Funder, Pilot, Survivor, Physician: Inside the Network Assisting Abortion Journeys

Three years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled states to severely restrict abortion or ban it outright. Since then, 17 states have enacted such limits; infant and maternal mortality have risen in many of them.

But the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade extends far beyond medical catastrophes. It also appears in the quieter struggles—a myriad of small, compounding barriers that stand between individuals and their access to health care.

Nine million women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States now live more than 200 miles from the nearest abortion clinic. Census data analyzed by Middlebury economics professor and data expert Caitlin Myers shows that people in two states—Texas and Louisiana—are, on average, more than 400 miles away from clinical abortion care. When faced with an unexpected, unwanted, or medically complicated pregnancy, they’re forced to navigate not just highways and airports, but the tricky algorithms of daily survival: How to miss work without losing their jobs; who will watch their children while they’re away; how they’ll afford the trip—and where they can stay overnight to recover or wait out a state-mandated waiting period between an initial appointment and their abortion.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that at least 324,700 people have left their states for abortions since the Dobbs ruling. In 2023, those people accounted for roughly one in six overall abortions in the states that allow them.

But there is at least one ray of light, a broad and determined network of abortion advocates—doctors, drivers, hotline volunteers, and even pilots who have stepped up to help. These humanitarians are not only assisting with travel and logistics, they’re showing up for desperate strangers navigating a system that hasn’t made abortion impossible, but has made it more challenging.

Abortion foes disparage these interstate quests for reproductive care as “abortion tourism,” an excuse to spend a long weekend by a hotel pool. But they are more akin to medical refugeeism—a journey of anxiety and cramping, not beaches and rollercoasters. “In an ideal world, people would just be able to get their abortion care in their community,” says Alisha Dingus, executive director of the DC Abortion Fund. But we’re obviously not in an ideal world. “In the short term,” says Dingus, one of nine people who share their experiences with abortion access below, “I hope that the abortion access movement can make navigating this easier.”