Abortions in Arizona increased 21% in 2024, data shows. Here's why

New data from an organization that supports abortion rights find there were nearly 17,000 abortions in Arizona in 2024. That’s about a 21% increase over 2023.

The Guttmacher Institute also found a drop in the number of people traveling to a different state to obtain the procedure.

Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, joined The Show to talk about the numbers and what they mean, starting with what stands out from this most recent batch of data.

Full conversation

ISAAC MADDOW-ZIMET: Well, I think really two things would stand out. One of them is that we know that 2024 was a year, in a lot of ways, of enormous change in the abortion access landscape. In particular, Florida and Iowa both had six-week bans that were implemented. Which really had major impacts on both residents of the state and the broader region. We also know that the funding environment more broadly for abortion care, got really strained in 2024. So it's in that context that it's surprising that the number of abortions in states without total bans was largely unchanged from 2023 to 2024. I think in a lot of ways, that's masking a lot of change at the state level, however. Florida saw a huge decline in the number of abortions provided — by 12,000 abortions — even though the six-week ban were was just in effect for part of the year. And then in other states, we saw increases, and some of that is because policies in one state affect what's happening in other states. So, Florida had a big decline, and then we saw a big increase in Virginia. Which was in part driven by people traveling from Florida to Virginia for care as that ban went into effect.

MARK BRODIE: So, one of the states that had a fairly sizable increase in the number of abortions in 2024 compared to 2023 is, of course, Arizona. There are about 3,000 more here. Are you seeing the same kind of factors at play here as you were seeing in other places?

MADDOW-ZIMET: So, Arizona is actually a little bit of a different situation. Part of what's going on in Arizona is that it's reflecting ... an increase in a new mode of care in Arizona. So, Arizona has a telehealth ban in effect for abortion, which can make it very hard to provide telehealth care to residents of the state. But starting in the second half of 2023, there started to be a somewhat new phenomenon, which is that providers in states with shield laws — so states like California, or New York or Massachusetts — were sending medication and providing telehealth to residents of states with bans on abortion and with telehealth bans on abortion. Arizona being one of them. And so part of the increase we're seeing is this new mode of care, of people accessing abortion through shield-law provision from other states.

BRODIE: So, it's not necessarily more visits to physicians in Arizona. It's Arizonans who are looking for this kind of care speaking with physicians online or on the phone in other places?

MADDOW-ZIMET: That's exactly right. So, there's certainly a piece of that. We also know that people from Arizona do travel out of state to get care, as well. So it's important to keep that in mind, too. Our most recent data is from 2023 as compared to 2024. But we know that a lot of Arizonans in 2023 traveled to Nevada, California and, to some extent, New Mexico taxes abortion care as well.

BRODIE: I'm curious what you are projecting — to the extent that you have projections for these kinds of things — what are you projecting in terms of what Arizona might look like in the next, let's say, year or two, given that voters here just enshrined abortion rights into the state Constitution?

MADDOW-ZIMET: Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really learned is it can be really hard to predict what's going to happen to abortion counts over time. In part, because really, what happens in one state really has ripple effects in a lot of other states as well. So, what happens in Arizona, in part, depends on what happens in New Mexico, or Colorado or Texas. Because people certainly can travel out of state, into the state for care. That hasn't happened a lot historically, there's not an enormous amount of people traveling to Arizona for care. That could change as clinic capacity increases, or it might not. It's one of those things that can be really, really difficult to predict. And I think that's one of the things that we've really learned as a result of doing this study, is that whatever we think is going to happen isn't necessarily the thing that is going to happen.

BRODIE: Yeah. Well, so you mentioned people traveling to other states. I'm curious what you saw related to that in Arizona, in terms of both Arizonans traveling elsewhere and other people traveling to Arizona for abortion care. Was there a lot of that going on?

MADDOW-ZIMET: Yeah, so not an enormous amount of people travel to Arizona for abortion care. And, in fact, there was a little bit of a decline from 2023 to 2024 in the number of people traveling. Only about 1% of abortions in Arizona in 2024 were to out-of-state residents. Part of that is because New Mexico and Colorado are both places where a lot of people seek care, particularly for people traveling from states like Texas. Just because New Mexico and Colorado, to some extent, are closer. People are often looking to travel to the place that is closest to them, that still often is hundreds of miles. But because cost really goes up so much as people have to travel farther, really one of the main places that we've seen in the Southwest for people traveling to is New Mexico. We don't have updated data yet in terms of people from Arizona traveling to other states, but we know for 2023 more than around 2,000 people from Arizona travel to other states for care.

BRODIE: So, you mentioned that it's very hard to predict what's going to happen. Are you still seeing a lot of law changes as it relates to abortion rights, either through state legislatures or through legal challenges to existing laws? Is there a lot of uncertainty as it relates to what the policies of a particular state are going to be going forward?

MADDOW-ZIMET: Yeah, I think there's two things in particular that we're really keeping an eye on. One of them is that a lot of what is driving the abortion access landscape in the U.S. right now is an enormous amount of travel across state lines. Which, to some extent, is a feature of many states having extremely restrictive policies in place, and some states having much more protective laws. You know, we estimate that in 2024, 155,000 people traveled across state lines to access abortion care. That's more than double the number of people who traveled in either 2019 or 2020. That travel can only happen because of an enormous amount of funding support, often from abortion funds, from practical support organizations, from clinicians. And what we've seen in general is that a lot of those folks got big increases in donations right after the Dobbs decision. And then as need has only increased, those donations have fallen off.

And so, one thing I think that we're keeping a close eye on is the sustainability of this broader funding network that has really allowed people to access care across the country. So, certainly that's one change that we're keeping an eye on. The other one, I think, is that telehealth has started to play a ... bigger and bigger role in terms of abortion provision nationally. It's also certainly the target of legal attacks and policy changes. And any restrictions on telehealth care, either at the state level or nationally, I think, could really create big barriers to access and ... we could see having fairly major impacts.