Recently, Meredith Ouderkirk, Director of Public Affairs at PPCWNY placed an op-ed in the Buffalo News analyzing the post-Dobbs reproductive freedom landscape. You can access the article with a Buffalo News subscription here: https://buffalonews.com/opinion/article_48930292-3bf3-448f-a9a1-0156c687ea6c.html or read below to see what she said!
Four years ago, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the constitutional right to abortion care. Supporters of the decision claimed it would “return the issue to the states,” a phrase that sounded neutral but masked its real impact. Four years later, one thing is clear: banning abortion doesn’t mean fewer abortions. In fact, the data tells the opposite story. In 2025, there were an estimated 1.126 million abortions in the United States – essentially unchanged from 2024 and higher than pre-Dobbs levels.
What has changed is access. Since June 2022, 13 states have total abortion bans, while many others enforce strict gestational limits, forcing patients to travel hundreds of miles and take on costs they cannot afford. In 2024 alone, approximately 155,000 people traveled across state lines for abortion care. Patients delay care while piecing together transportation, lodging, childcare, and time off work. Some continue their pregnancies – not because they changed their minds about parenthood, but because they just can’t get to an access state.
After bans took effect, average travel time for abortion care skyrocketed from 2.8 hours to 11.3 hours. Travel costs more than doubled – from $179 to $372. The consequences of these unrelenting attacks on reproductive care go beyond abortion. Sometimes the impact is obvious – headline-making stories about people forced to carry pregnancies under devastating circumstances or doctors waiting to treat a miscarrying patient because these new restrictions are written by politicians sorely lacking any understanding of obstetric and gynecological care. At what point is a patient’s life at risk enough for a doctor to step in? The answers are unclear across many parts of the country. Just as often, the impacts are quieter – couched in difficult-to-understand budget policy.
In the last year alone, federal actions have stripped Planned Parenthood health centers of critical funding, blocking patients from seeing trusted providers – even for services that have nothing to do with abortion such as cancer screenings, contraception, STI tests and treatment. This has never just been about abortion, and it has definitely never been about protecting patients. It’s about control. But we aren’t backing down from the fight. Health care should be guided by patients and medical professionals, not politicians. Four years later, abortion hasn’t disappeared. It hasn’t even decreased – the change we’re seeing is a deepening divide between who gets access to care and who is forced to carry the burden of a system designed to make everything harder. Our patients deserve better. The fight for reproductive freedom didn’t end with Dobbs. Neither did our commitment to the people who depend on us. Care continues, no matter what.