Abortion Clinics Are Closing Across The Country & Not Just In Red States

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 created a patchwork of abortion access throughout the United States. Trigger laws, which stood to ban or severely limit the procedure but were blocked by Roe previous, immediately went into affect in a number of states. As such, clinics across the country are closing their doors... including in states more protective of abortion rights.

Today, three years after the fall of Roe, 13 states have a total abortion bans while an additional 4 ban the procedure at six weeks, which is very often before someone knows they’re pregnant in the first place. According to reporting from Associated Press, there have been 105 clinic closures since 2022 — 29 have been in states that ban abortion, 11 are in states with six-week bans, but a surprising 65 have occurred in other states, including some with protective abortion laws, largely due to mounting financial pressures.

While organizations that support abortion — including Planned Parenthood — saw a surge of financial support in 2022, those funds have begun to peter out in the ensuing years and do not meet the consistent (and in some cases growing) need for services. Clinics also rely on federal funding via Title X, which provides support clinics that provide family planning services to low-income and uninsured individuals. In March, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) informed almost one in five Title X grantees that their funding would be temporarily withheld to the tune of $27.5 million.

There are some mitigating factors that can serve to heartened abortion rights activists.

Even as there have been closures, 34 facilities have either re-opened or re-located to more permissive states. While this still represents a net loss of 71 facilities, those clinics still work to serve the public.

Additionally, in 2021 the FDA ruled that mifepristone, popularly called “the abortion pill,” did not require in-person dispensation. Furthermore, it no longer needed to be given only through specially-certified pharmacies. The move has made abortion access via telehealth more widely available. As such, the number of medication abortions — abortions done with pills rather than surgically by a healthcare provider — rose from 53% of abortions in 2020 to 63% in 2023.

But while telehealth has become increasingly important, the majority of abortions — between 60% and 80% — are still obtained via brick-and-mortar clinics.

Moreover, the expanded access of mifepristone is currently in the sights of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, who told a congressional panel that he and FDA director Marty Makary were committed to a “complete review” of the drug in light of a damning paper titled “The Abortion Pill Harms Women: Insurance Data Reveals One in Ten Patients Experiences a Serious Adverse Event.” The paper, authored by an explicitly anti-abortion conservative think tank associated with Project 2025, was not published in a medical journal, has not been peer reviewed, and has been criticized as “flawed” for both its methodology and lack of transparency.

As such, clinic closures have profound affects on the communities they serve. Often, this does not just include abortion patients, but poor people who require birth control, pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and cancer screenings.