Kansas providers performed a historic number of abortions in 2023 – and most of them were performed on out-of-state residents – in a sign of just how much the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade has rewritten the map of abortion access and led women to flee their home states for the procedure.
More than 19,000 abortions took place in Kansas in 2023, a 58% increase from 2022, according to a recent report from the Kansas department of health and environment. Of those, roughly 4,300 abortions were performed on Kansas residents, while about 15,000 were done on out-of-state residents.
Most of those out-of-state residents were from Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri – three states that neighbor Kansas and have banned virtually all abortions.
The increase in Kansas abortions mirrors the national upswing in the procedure. In 2023, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortions and restrictions, recorded more than 1m US abortions. That’s the highest number documented in a decade.
“It really speaks to a bifurcation of access,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher Institute data scientist, told the Guardian late last year.
“On one hand, you have many states where abortion has gotten incredibly difficult to access – states with total bans, states with six-week bans. Access has gotten much more difficult for people living in those states. And then, on the other hand, you have states with more protective laws where a lot of the things that people have been doing to ameliorate the effects of bans have also increased access to residents of those states.”
Kansas has long been a national flashpoint in the debate over US abortions. In 1991, thousands of anti-abortion protesters swarmed the state’s clinics, leading to more than 2,600 arrests. In 2009, an anti-abortion activist shot George Tiller, one of the nation’s most famous abortion providers, to death in Tiller’s Wichita, Kansas, church.
More recently, in 2022, Kansas became the first state in the nation to hold a post-Roe ballot measure on abortion rights. The red state stunned the country by voting overwhelmingly in favor of preserving abortion rights. Several other states, including the Republican strongholds of Ohio and Montana, have since gone on to pass pro-abortion ballot measures.
In 2024, however, Kansas’s Republican-controlled state legislature overrode the Democratic governor Laura Kelly to pass a bill dramatically expanding the government’s record-keeping of the abortions performed in Kansas.
Except in medical emergencies, abortion providers are now required to ask patients to name the most important factor in their decision to get an abortion as well as questions about their marital status, education level, recent experience with domestic violence and whether they have received financial assistance in the last 30 days.
Abortion rights supporters have long warned that such extensive record-keeping can stigmatize the procedure and potentially endanger the privacy of abortion patients. Project 2025, a famous wishlist of conservative policy proposals, has suggested increasing the CDC’s national “surveillance” of abortions.
The wishlist urges the CDC to cut funds from states that do not supply the agency with information about “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”.