More women are ending pregnancies on their own, a new study suggests. Some resort to unsafe methods
A growing number of women said they’ve tried to end their pregnancies on their own by doing things like taking herbs, drinking alcohol or even hitting themselves in the belly, a new study suggests.
Researchers surveyed reproductive-age women in the U.S. before and after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The proportion who reported trying to end pregnancies by themselves rose from 2.4% to 3.3%.
A lot of people are taking things into their own hands,” said Dr. Grace Ferguson, a Pittsburgh OB-GYN and abortion provider who wasn’t involved in the research, which was published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Study authors acknowledged that the increase is small. But the data suggests that it could number in the hundreds of thousands of women.
Researchers surveyed about 7,000 women six months before the Supreme Court decision, and then another group of 7,100 a year after the decision. They asked whether participants had ever taken or done something on their own to end a pregnancy. Those who said yes were asked follow-up questions about their experiences.
“Our data show that making abortion more difficult to access is not going to mean that people want or need an abortion less frequently,” said Lauren Ralph, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the study’s authors.
