New Mexico saw a 36% drop in the number of medical professionals who provide abortions across the state between 2014 and 2017, from 11 to seven, according to a report released by the Guttmacher Institute last week. The number of clinics offering abortions declined too, by 33%, from nine to six.
But the number of abortions performed in New Mexico did not increase or decrease during the same time period, bucking the nationwide decrease in abortions. The number of abortions in New Mexico per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 stayed at 10 from 2014 to 2017.
Nationally, the rate of abortions has declined to its lowest recorded rate since abortion was legalized in 1973. In 2017, an estimated 862,320 abortions were provided in clinics in the United States––a 7% decline since 2014. That’s 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in 2017. Abortion rates fell in most states and in all four regions of the country, according to the study.
Denicia Cadena, policy director of Young Women United, says the data show more women are coming from out of state to get abortions in New Mexico, which could account for the decrease in providers but steady number of abortions.
“With some of these really callous six-week abortion ban regulations—that’s before most people even know they’re pregnant—women from our neighboring states like Texas are needing to travel to New Mexico to get care,” Cadena tells SFR via phone.
Guttmacher’s analysis supports that theory.
Nearly 400 state laws restricting abortion access were enacted across the country between 2011 and 2017, but Guttmacher found that those laws were not the main driver of the overall decline in abortions. Rather, declines in 18 states and the District of Columbia that did not enact new restrictions during that period accounted for 57% of the national decline.
States neighboring New Mexico—Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Utah—have all seen declines in the number of abortions in the state.
The Guttmacher report offers a different theory for the national decrease in abortions: Fewer women are getting pregnant, and access to contraception has spiked since the Affordable Care Act required health insurers to cover birth control in 2011.
Nearly 74% of women in New Mexico were using some form of contraception in 2017. With a majority of women between the ages of 18 and 49 using protection, according to the report, Cadena says recent strides in improving contraception access in the state could be a reason why many of the women getting abortions in New Mexico are from elsewhere.
“My organization and others have done deep work on contraception access,” she says. “I know previous data has shown that affordable and no-cost [contraception] is the biggest factor in declining abortion rates and I’m certain that would be true for New Mexico. But clinics are not the only place abortions can happen—because of medical abortions.”
Medical abortions require a woman to take a combination of medications that induce a miscarriage and are effective until about the 10th week of pregnancy.
The report also found a rise in unreported, self-managed abortions which may have also played a role in the decline in the national rate. A self-managed abortion is when a woman uses the drug misoprostol, which is available over-the-counter and has been imported illegally into the United States for at least a decade for use in induced miscarriages at home. Recently, the highly effective combination of mifepristone and misoprostol has become easily available on the internet.
According to Guttmacher, the majority of women seeking abortions are poor or low-income, many lack health insurance that will cover the procedure, and many live in states with numerous abortion restrictions.
New Mexico organizations have seen that trend and raised funds in order to aid women in obtaining abortions.
“When abortions are banned, the women who are impacted are young, poor women, mostly women of color, because wealthy women have always been able to get abortions, even before” the landmark US Supreme Court Roe v Wade enshrined the right to abortion, says Joan Sanford, executive director of the New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
“The fact that we have three or four active abortion funds is possibly another reason why women come here. Santa Fe NOW [National Organization for Women] has been raising money for non-medical expenses for women in New Mexico and giving that money to the Religious Coalition and several other abortion funds [last year] to supplement women so they can get the care that they need,” she says.
A nonprofit called the Action Network raised $25,000 last year for abortion funds in New Mexico, Sanford says. Other organizations have teamed up to create the New Mexico Choice Coalition, including Santa Fe NOW, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Equality New Mexico and Young Women United.
It’s an “extraordinary group of organizations that have remained strong through ups and downs,” Sanford says. Ultimately, “the story about abortion is who these restrictions impact.”
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