The number of patients coming to Illinois for abortions has soared since Roe v. Wade was overturned, according to new state figures.
Nearly 17,000 patients came to Illinois from other states for abortions in 2022 compared with about 11,300 out-of-state patients in 2021, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health’s annual abortion statistics report.
The surge in out-of-state patients led to more than 56,000 abortion procedures in the state in 2022, the highest number in at least 25 years.
In 1996, about 3,900 people from outside Illinois were among the 53,000 patients who terminated pregnancies in the state, the agency reported. That year, abortions for out-of-state patients made up about 7% of the total. In 2022, abortions for those coming into Illinois made up about 30%.
In 2015, over 3,200 out-of-state patients received abortions in Illinois. Alison Dreith, director of strategic partnerships at the Midwest Access Coalition, was one of them.
“At the time, I lived in Missouri and I did cross state lines into Illinois to get that care because I knew how harmful and how shaming Missouri laws were in their abortion restrictions, and I didn’t want to go through that,” Dreith told the Sun-Times.
From 2021 to 2022, the coalition saw its patient population double from about 800 to more than 1,600. Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, some 800 clients have come from Texas and several hundred more have come from other states.
“Just like pre-Roe, this is going to have generational impacts on our communities,” Dreith said. “Abortion can be life-saving for many, many people. It [also] has economic implications about whether or not people can afford a family.”
Planned Parenthood of Illinois clinics have seen a 54% increase in in-state and out-of-state patients since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The health provider serves patients from 40 different states — predominantly Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas.
“Abortions are happening at later stages and that’s because [patients] have to make travel plans,” said Cristina Villarreal, chief external affairs officer of Planned Parenthood of Illinois. “It’s so much larger than an inconvenience, it’s an upheaval of people’s lives.”
More than 3,100 pregnancies at 16 weeks gestation or longer were terminated in the state in 2022, compared to nearly 2,200 pregnancy terminations in the same category in 2021, the Public Health Department reported.
“A lot of clinics are still booking two or three weeks out, and that delays care where a person could have been a one-day appointment,” Dreith said.
Ameri Klafeta, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, says the organization hears all the time about the hardships some patients face when coming from other states.
“People are coming here sicker because they can’t get health care that they need for their own health in their home states,” Klafeta said.
Klafeta said the ACLU has been “working hard in the Legislature the last few years to get policies in place.”
“People make the decision to head out to get abortion care for all sorts of reasons ... These abortion bans just make it very difficult for people with respect to their health,” Klafeta said. “In Illinois, we trust people to make decisions for themselves about their own health care and about what their families look like.”
Dreith, Villarreal and Klafeta weren’t surprised to see the increase in out-of-state patients and overall abortions in Illinois for 2022.
“If anything, it just kind of shows that the work we have been doing all along was necessary,” Villarreal said.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022, several states surrounding Illinois either enforced severe restrictions on abortion or have made abortion illegal entirely.
The number of Illinois residents who received abortions slightly decreased compared with 2021, from about 40,000 to nearly 39,000, the department reported.
After the elimination of the constitutional right to an abortion, the Department of Public Health stopped reporting abortion data for Illinois counties or identifying the states from which patients traveled.
Klafeta emphasized that patients should have access to abortion care wherever they live.
“It’s good that Illinois is a place where people can get this care, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for people to do,” Klafeta said.
