Three Years After Roe

The fight for reproductive justice continues to be tested.

I read the other day from some expert on fascism and authoritarianism that we should write as much as we can these days so we have a record of how fast things were changing and laws disappearing, alongside people.

But on this third anniversary of Roe, I think there’s no better indicator of where things stand politically for everyone is looking at the state of reproductive rights in what was once, the world’s richest democracy. Even looking back a mere six months ago, it seems like a different world.

The Guttmacher Institute released new data on the state of residence of abortion patients who traveled out of state to obtain care in 2024 to add to the growing evidence on how abortion bans in individual states are affecting patient movement and reshaping access to abortion care across the country.

The data are part of Guttmacher’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study, which provides ongoing national and state-level estimates of US abortion incidence and currently includes data from January 2023 through March 2025.

To recap, in the three years since American women lost their constitutionally protected right to safe and legal abortion, the damage is consistent. We’re seeing maternal mortality rising in states with total bans and the number of people traveling out of state annually to obtain an abortion has doubled (155,000 people in 2024).

Women are nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy where abortion is illegal, and in states with abortion bans, infant deaths are 5.6% higher.

While it may be impossible to think about what the next six months will look like in the United States, if women’s health is any indicator, we better be prepared for the worst— for all of us, not just women.

But we also better be prepared to fight.

As our friends over at Gemma Talks remind us, “…When Roe fell, while devastating, what crumbled wasn’t a foundation. It was a fragile compromise. And the silver lining is this: We now have the chance to build something much stronger.”