R&I – FS
Last week, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a law outlawing abortion in the state. If it isn’t blocked by the courts, the legislation — which has no exceptions for rape or incest — would be one of the harshest measures to become law at a time when anti-abortion lawmakers are all but competing with each other to pass new restrictions.
But in a sense, Oklahoma legislators who want to end abortion don’t have much more to do in their state. New data exclusively analyzed by FiveThirtyEight shows that it’s already very difficult to get an abortion appointment in Oklahoma — and it has nothing to do with the state’s new ban. Ever since the Supreme Court allowed a highly restrictive abortion law to go into effect in Texas last September, Oklahoma’s four abortion clinics have been overrun with demand from out-of-state patients. When a team of academic researchers posed as pregnant people and called the Oklahoma clinics at the beginning of March, all four told the callers they couldn’t schedule them for an appointment.
As is the case for all the data, it’s possible that someone calling at another time would have gotten a different answer. When FiveThirtyEight reached out to the four Oklahoma clinics last week, one administrator said in an email, “Our wait times at the beginning of March for the [abortion] pill was about 3 weeks and for surgical procedure about 3-4 weeks. … We did not stop scheduling at any point.”
Regardless, the impact of the Texas ban isn’t just being felt in Oklahoma. According to the research, waits of two or three weeks for an abortion appointment are common in eight states surrounding Texas — much longer than the waits in states further away.
Just Think
Article URL : https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/it-can-already-take-weeks-to-get-an-abortion/