The number of abortions in Michigan increased slightly again last year, with thousands of people still coming from other states, including hundreds from as far away as Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia.
Nationally, the US has seen a surge in people traveling out of state for abortions since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, with “more than 166,000 US abortion patients [having] traveled to other states to obtain care in 2023,” according to the Guttmacher Institute. That’s twice as many as those who traveled out-of-state in 2020.
Of the more than 31,000 abortions performed in Michigan last year, about 9% were for non-Michigan residents, according to the most recently released state data. Nearly 5% were from Ohio, where a 6-week abortion ban had been working its way through the courts, until voters there passed constitutional protections for abortion in November 2023. Another 2% were from Indiana, which enacted a near-total ban on abortion last year.
And still others traveled thousands of miles from states with broad abortion bans: 138 abortions performed in Michigan last year were for patients from Texas; 67 were from Georgia; 61 were from Kentucky; and 32 were from Florida.
Michigan saw a significant increase in the number of abortions for non-residents between 2021 (when 1,665 abortions were for out-of-state residents) and 2022, when more than 2,761 abortions were for non-Michigan residents. That number stayed pretty flat in 2023, when 2,750 abortions were for non-Michigan residents.
Planned Parenthood of Michigan said they've continued to see a 3x increase in the number of out-of-state patients since Dobbs, with patients increasingly using virtual telehealth centers and receiving medication abortion pills in the mail. “Through 2023 and into the first half of 2024, the number of out-of-state patients remains steady at triple what they were pre-Dobbs,” said Erica Shekell, a spokesperson for PPMI, in an email Friday. “Prior to Dobbs, we were providing abortions for just over 600 out-of-state patients per year; now, we’re providing about 1,700.”
State will no longer require abortion reporting from doctors
Abortion rights opponents say they’re alarmed that this is “the last abortion report our state is required to issue,” since Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the Reproductive Health Act (RHA) late last year. The RHA repealed several abortion restrictions that were still on books following the passage of Prop 3, including language in the public health code requiring physicians to report any abortions they perform (and resulting complications) to the state.
“The latest state abortion report compiled by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) is both significant in its revelations and in that it is the last abortion report our state is required to issue,” Right to Life of Michigan President Amber Roseboom said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “The abortion report reveals an increase in abortions coupled with a dramatic spike in abortion complications and should be of concern to anyone who truly cares about women’s health.”
The latest Michigan data does show a slight increase in both immediate and subsequent complication rates, but still very low rates of complications overall (none of which were fatal.)
“The rate of immediate complications is .5 per 1,000 occurrences,” said Lynn Sutfin, a spokesperson for MDHHS. “Although higher than 2022, this is in line with previous years including 2013-2017.” (The state doesn’t track whether complications were serious, or involved hospitalization.)
There were also 247 “subsequent complications” (meaning they occurred within seven days of the abortion) reported in 2023, about half of which were “failed abortions.” The state defines a “failed abortion” as “an abortion attempt that results in an ongoing pregnancy after an attempt at either surgical or medical abortion,” and says they’re “the most common subsequent complication reported.” (Medication abortion is effective about 95% to 97% of the time, procedural abortions are effective about 98% of the time.)
Sutfin says removing the requirement for abortion providers to report data to MDHHS merely puts abortion “in line with most other medical procedures.”
“For years, women and their doctors faced burdensome requirements when seeking abortion care that had no basis in medicine and were designed to dissuade women from accessing the care they needed,” MDHHS spokesperson Lynn Sutfin said in an email Thursday.
Dr. Sarah Wallett, the chief medical operating officer for PPMI, says the organization “will voluntarily participate in data reporting for WeCount, a reporting effort by the Society of Family Planning that began collecting data after the Dobbs decision to capture shifts in abortion volume by state and by month, as well as the Monthly Abortion Provision Study collected by the Guttmacher Institute. Both WeCount and Guttmacher use clinic-level data — the number of abortion procedures we provide — rather than private demographic data…The reporting of private demographic data does not make abortion any safer than it already is, and instead may have a chilling effect for our patients.”
