How the abortion rights landscape changed in 2024

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, ending the federal enshrinement of abortion rights in America. The repeal of Roe has significantly changed the landscape of reproductive care access across the country and 2024 marked numerous noteworthy changes.
Since Dobbs, which gave states the right to ban abortion, many states have gone above and beyond to further clamp down on access to abortion care. As of the end of December 2024, according to KFF’s dashboard, 12 states have completely banned abortions. Six states restrict abortion access between 6 and 12 weeks of gestation. Four restrict access between 18 and 22 weeks. In contrast, 14 states have enshrined reproductive rights, including abortion access, into their state constitutions.
As I’ve reported for Salon this year, the direct and indirect effects of abortion bans and restrictions impact far more than just people who can get pregnant. From putting pressure on care in states where abortion remains accessible to inflicting trauma and grief on those who are forced to travel to access care, here’s how the reproductive rights landscape changed in 2024, post-Dobbs.
01 More people stockpiled abortion pills 2024 began with the anticipation that the Supreme Court would invalidate the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. That didn’t happen, but it did bring attention to how people were stockpiling abortion pills in the wake of Roe being overturned. In the U.S., a medication abortion is usually prescribed when a woman is pregnant. However, the idea of a so-called “advance provision,” is akin to keeping Tylenol around for a fever but instead keeping abortion pills nearby for pregnancy. While mifepristone was able to retain approval this year, the Supreme Court did leave the door open to future challenges to abortion drugs. More recently, there have been reports of states stockpiling abortion pills, too, in anticipation of the incoming second Trump presidency. Specifically, there are concerns that a Trump-Vance administration could leverage the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law that bans obscene articles being used for abortion from being mailed. As explained by KFF, a literal interpretation of this could mean that material to produce all abortions would be prohibited from being sent, which could affect other medical care, like miscarriage management, and stop medication abortion from being sent. This would effectively be another form of a nationwide abortion ban.
02 Interest in permanent contraception increased Immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Google saw the highest volume of searches for “vasectomy” in the past five years. In 2023, preliminary data found a significant uptick in vasectomy consultations. According to the International Journal of Impotence Research, there was a 35 percent increase in vasectomy consultation requests and a 22.4 percent increase in actual vasectomy consultations after the Dobbs decision. Notably, the men seeking vasectomies were younger than before, and a higher number of men without children requested information about the procedure. In 2024, new research found that despite all the attention on male vasectomies post-Dobbs, the rise in tubal sterilizations among females was twice as high as the increase among vasectomies in males. “This increase is likely reflecting the fear or anxiety among young people about restricted access to abortion and potentially restricted access to contraception down the road,” lead author Jacqueline Ellison, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Pitt School of Public Health, told Salon earlier this year. A study published later in 2024 found that the fallout of the Dobbs decision wasn’t only affecting what contraceptive methods patients were seeking, but also how some doctors were responding and counseling their patients in return. Researchers stated that the Dobbs decision had “profoundly” impacted providers’ contraceptive counseling and care.
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03 The tragic, yet foreseeable, consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade were revealed Pro-abortion activists warned before and after the Dobbs ruling that abortion bans would kill women. This year, multiple news outlets reported on several tragic stories about how this happened. Specifically, ProPublica reported multiple stories of women who died from abortion bans. It was the first time these deaths were deemed “preventable” by a state committee of experts in maternal health. In one story, a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother, died less than a month after Georgia passed its abortion law after waiting 20 hours to get treatment for a rare complication from taking an abortion pill. A 10-member committee set up to examine maternal mortality cases deemed she would have likely lived if doctors had used the protocols that had been in place before the Georgia law made them a felony. Another story involved a woman named Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three, who had been told by doctors that