Leaving Louisiana: Leveraging abortion fund data to document later abortion care in the Gulf South post-Dobbs
Abortion
Awarded 2023
Later abortion service delivery, post-Dobbs
Jennifer Chin, MD
University of Washington
$49,966

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the US. Constitution does not confer the right to abortion. As of August 2023, 14 states, including Louisiana, have enacted total bans on abortion, and one in three pregnancy-capable people must now travel out-of-state to receive this essential health care in a clinical setting. These bans have had a devastating impact on later abortion care, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) individuals and other vulnerable populations who were already marginalized in reproductive healthcare services prior to Dobbs. Our multidisciplinary team, comprised of the Louisiana Abortion Fund (LAAF) Policy Project Coordinator, the former medical director of two Louisiana abortion clinics, the director of a clinical Complex Family Planning program, a Complex Family Planning clinician-scientist, and a public health researcher, is ideally positioned to analyze LAAF data from 2019 to 2023. We will utilize these data to evaluate delays and barriers in later abortion access in Louisiana and surrounding states (the Gulf South) following Dobbs, with a focus on the impact these delays have had on BIPOC individuals and other marginalized populations. This proposal addresses a critical gap in understanding abortion patterns and demographics by leveraging a unique, community-oriented, and proprietary dataset exclusively available through LAAF to gain in-depth insights into the real-world impact of abortion criminalization on individuals seeking later abortion services in the Gulf South.