Data

This dashboard is a collaborative projection with Lauren Bennett, Flora Vale, and Alberto Nieto to visualize and disseminate timely data on abortion bans as they rippled across the country and the resulting effects on travel times and appointment availability. The dashboard allows users to explore and download county and state-level summary statistics on travel times and distances as well as information on congestion at the facility destinations.

The Myers Abortion Facility Database identifies the names and addresses of all facilities—including private physician offices, hospitals, and freestanding clinics—that publicly advertised the provision of abortion services or are otherwise likely to be identifiable to a large fraction of women seeking an abortion. This database is not intended to capture private physicians and hospitals that provide a small number of abortions each year and do not advertise their services. The database was collected for academic research purposes and covers the period January 1, 2009 through October 1, 2022 for all states. The OSF project page for these data include documentation and an application to obtain the restricted use data for academic research purposes. They also include public and downloadable data providing county-by-month travel distances and times to the nearest abortion facility.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, states began acting to ban abortions by enforcing “trigger bans” designed to take effect after the end of Roe, and/or enforcing pre-Roe bans that had lain dormant and unenforced in their statutes for five decades, and/or enacting new bans. As these bans take effect, abortion facilities shutter, potentially causing large volumes of pregnant people seeking abortions to redirect to more distant facilities that remain open. Supported by funding from Middlebury College and the Society for Family Planning, I am working with a team of Middlebury College students to conduct regular surveys of appointment availability at all U.S. abortion providers.

Over the past two decades, I have compiled several panels of state-level policies governing access to contraception and abortion. I am working to document and post all of these data to Open Science Framework. At present the page includes detailed documentation and datasets describing policies governing the legal distribution of contraception and provision of abortion as well as policies governing young women’s rights to consent to them for the period 1960 through 2021.

Coming soon: I’ll add data describing mandatory waiting period policies enforced since 1980.

I have compiled abortion counts and rates by county of residence from state health departments for a new paper on the effects of travel distance. These data were collected from reports published by state health departments providing county-level resident abortion counts for any year in the period 2009-2022. They are an incomplete and unbalanced panel because not all states surveil abortions, and among those that do not all states record and publish county of residents of abortion patients. In addition, while some states track residents’ abortions in neighbouring states through reciprocal reporting agreements, most do not and their resident abortion counts reflect only abortions occurring in state. Users should note these critical features of the data and assess their implications for their own research purposes. The User’s Guide and Codebook contains more information, including a list of availability by state.