The abortion pill regimen, which included mifepristone, as shown, and misoprostol, was how most study participants said they self-administered their abortions.
Sarah McCammon/NPR
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Sarah McCammon/NPR
The proportion of people who said they had tried to end a pregnancy without medical assistance rose after the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. Roe v. Wade. That is according to a published research in the online journal JAMA Network Open.
Tia Freeman, a reproductive health organizer, leads workshops for Tennesseans on how to safely use abortion pills outside of medical facilities.
Different reasons
Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Tennessee. Freeman, who lives near Nashville, said people who plan to end a pregnancy have all sorts of reasons for wanting to do so without help from the formal health care system — including the cost of traveling to another state, difficulty finding child care, and fear of losing wages.
“Some people don’t have a support network at home where they need someone to take them to the clinic and sit with them,” he said. Free man,who works for Self-managed abortion; Safe and supporteda US-based project of Women Help Women, an international non-profit organization that advocates for abortion rights.
“Maybe their family is very conservative, and they want to buy medicine at home and take it themselves,” she said.
The new study comes from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research group based at the University of California-San Francisco. Researchers surveyed more than 7,000 people between the ages of 15 and 49 from December 2021 to January 2022 and another 7,000 from June 2023 to July 2023.
Among respondents who attempted to self-abort, they found the rate of use of the abortion pill mifepristone was 11 in 2023 — up from 6.6 before the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights in 2022.
Privacy concerns
One of the most common reasons for seeking an abortion on their own is privacy concerns, said a study co-author and epidemiologist. Lauren Ralph.
“So they don’t want other people to know that they are seeking or needing an abortion or they want to maintain autonomy in the decision,” Ralph said. “They like that it is something that is within their control that they can do on their own.”
Kristi Hamrickvice president of communications and policy at Students for Life Action, a national anti-abortion group, said she does not believe the study’s findings, which she said favor abortion providers.
“It is no surprise that the abortion advocacy group reports that their business is still going strong, with no issues,” Hamrick said in an emailed statement.
In addition to privacy concerns, state laws criminalizing abortion also have a heavy impact on women’s minds, Ralph said.
“We found that 6% of people said the reason they self-managed was because abortion was illegal where they lived,” Ralph said.
Self-harm, also reported
In the JAMA study, women who self-induced abortions reported using a variety of methods, including using drugs or alcohol, lifting heavy objects, and taking hot baths. In addition, about 22% reported hitting themselves in the abdomen. Nearly 4% reported inserting an object into their bodies.
The term “self-managed abortion” may conjure up images of back-alley procedures from the 1950s and 1960s. But obstetrician-gynecologist Laura Laursen, a family planning doctor in Chicago, says self-managed abortions using the abortion pills — mifepristone and misoprostol — are much safer, whether performed inside or outside the health care system.
“They are equally safe no matter which way you do it,” Laursen said. “It involves conception and bleeding, which is what happens when you miscarry. If your body doesn’t miscarry on its own, these are actually the medications we give women to miscarry.”
Since the Roe decision, more than 20 states have banned or further restricted abortion.
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