Hey, Look! Another Reminder That Abortion Bans Haven’t Stopped People from Needing Abortion Care

June will mark four years since the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade, making it eons easier for anti-abortion lawmakers, mandates, and gremlins alike to go full-steam on their animus-filled agenda. But in yet another reminder that abortion bans do not stop people from needing abortions or finding ways to get them, the Guttmacher Institute on Tuesday published its 2025 data, and what do you know? Abortion bans have still not stopped people from needing abortions or finding ways to get them. What’s more, they have also not stopped doctors and providers from helping patients who need abortion care. 

In 2025, an estimated 1,125,930 abortions were performed in the U.S.—approximately the same number (1,123,600) that occurred in 2024, according to Guttmacher. The standout difference is that telehealth abortions have become much more common in states with near-total bans, accounting for 72,000 abortions in 2024 and 91,000 in 2025. 

“A lot of that is largely a reflection of the changing role that telehealth care—and especially shield laws—have played in the abortion provision landscape, in the years since Dobbs,” Kimya Forouzan, Guttmacher’s principal state policy advisor and one of the study’s co-authors, told Jezebel. “[Shield laws] have been a really key way that people have been able to access care post-Dobbs, and at the same time, they have faced really only increasing attacks.” 

Currently, 22 states and Washington, D.C. have some sort of shield law in place, which allows out-of-state doctors and providers to prescribe abortion pills to people in abortion-banned states—without the fear of prosecution. This has really ruffled the feathers of anti-abortion attorneys general and lawmakers, who have made it their life’s mission to try and dismantle abortion access.

An overwhelming number of attacks on shield laws have come out of Texas, which, in December, enacted a “bounty hunter law” to allow Texans to sue anybody who “manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides” abortion pills to someone in the state for $100,000. The state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has also spent the last couple of years trying to prosecute shield laws—most notably against New York-based Dr. Maggie Carpenter, who allegedly sent abortion pills to a woman in the state.

The data adds more context to an earlier study conducted by #WeCount in December, which found telehealth abortions accounted for 27% of abortions in the first half of 2025—a slight increase from 25% at the end of 2024, and a huge jump from 5% in spring 2022. 

So it’s worth repeating that, as the Trump administration and Congress’s very own anti-abortion Slenderman continue to say otherwise, here’s your regular reminder that mifepristone, the first part of a telehealth abortion, is safe—and over a decade’s worth of FDA studies declaring so was based on facts and real science. 

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