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 how much the 2022 overturn of Roe v Wade has rewritten the map of abortion access and empowered women incited to flee their home state for the procedure.
More than 19,000 abortions occurred in Kansas in 2023, a 58% increase from 2022, according to a study recent report from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. Of those, about 4,300 abortions were performed on Kansas residents, while about 15,000 were performed on out-of-state residents.
Most of these out-of-state residents were from TexasOklahoma and Missouri – three states bordering Kansas that have banned virtually all abortions.
The increase in abortions in Kansas reflects the national uptick in the procedure. In 2023, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortions and restrictions, recorded more than 1 million abortions in the US. That is the highest number documented in ten years.
“It really speaks to a bifurcation of access,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, told the Guardian late last year.
“On the one hand, you have a lot of states where abortion has become incredibly difficult to access – states with total bans, states with six-week bans. Access has become much more difficult for people living in those states. And on the other hand, you have states with more protective laws, where many of the things people have done to mitigate the effects of bans have also increased access for residents of those states.
Kansas has long been a national flashpoint in the debate over abortions in the US. In 1991, thousands of anti-abortion protesters poured into state clinics, leading to more than 2,600 arrests. In 2009, an anti-abortion activist shot and killed George Tiller, one of the country’s most famous abortion providers, in Tiller’s Wichita, Kansas, church.
More recently, in 2022, Kansas became the first state in the country to introduce an abortion rights measure after the Roe vote. The red state surprised the country by voting overwhelmingly in favor of retaining abortion rights. Several other states, including Republican strongholds Ohio and Montana, have since passed pro-abortion ballot measures.
However, in 2024, the Republican-controlled Kansas state legislature overruled Democratic Governor Laura Kelly and passed a bill that dramatically expanded the registration of 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 have an abortion, as well as questions about their marital status, level of education, recent experiences with domestic violence, and whether they have received financial assistance in the past 30 days.
Abortion rights advocates have long warned that such extensive registration could stigmatize the procedure and potentially jeopardize the privacy of abortion patients. Project 2025, a famous wish list of conservative policy proposals, has proposed increasing the CDC’s national “oversight” of abortions.
The wish list urges the CDC to cut funding from states that do not provide the agency with information on “exactly how many abortions occur within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, in what state the mother lives, and by what method”.