Abortion Rate

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an unsigned order putting on hold recent lower court rulings that would have restricted access to — or banned entirely — the abortion drug mifepristone.

Following the Dobbs decision, substantial decreases were observed in the number of abortions performed in states with and without abortion bans, according to a national reporting study from the Society of Family Planning.

On Wednesday, judges from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of a federal court decision that would reverse FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. That original decision is on hold during the appeals process.

On April 7, a U.S. District Court judge in Texas suspended FDA approval of the abortifacient mifepristone giving the government 7 days to appeal, and a second judge in Washington ruled not to restrict the drug in states allowing abortion.

Losing the constitutional right to abortion is associated with a 10% increase in mental distress prevalence among women of reproductive age, researchers reported in JAMA Network Open.

From 2011 to 2018, neonatal Down syndrome diagnoses increased more in states that banned abortion at 20 weeks’ gestation compared with states without such bans, according to a population-based cohort study published in JAMA Network Open.

In July 2022, a Georgia law limiting abortion to early pregnancy was put into effect and will eliminate abortion access for most women and disproportionately harm Black, younger and lower socioeconomic individuals, data suggest.

Many women are facing extreme travel times to get an abortion, researchers found in one of the first studies to assess the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.Benjamin Rader, MPH, of the computational epidemiology lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues sought to understand changes in travel time to the closest facility providing abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer.

The June 24 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade continues to reverberate across all of health care, including rheumatology, dermatology and cancer treatment — and in this instance all three at once.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, rheumatologists and rheumatology associations are voicing concern over what the loss of federal abortion protections could mean for patients.