“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.”
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“Further restricting abortion will affect people all over the country, including in blue states. In fact, that may already be happening. Even in states where abortion access is protected, there were clinics with long waits in the data we analyzed. Thirty-one percent of clinics in New York and 67 percent of clinics in Oregon, for example, had a wait time of more than a week. This was particularly pronounced for clinics in rural areas, but more densely populated areas weren’t immune. In seven metropolitan areas — about 3 percent of metro areas with clinics — there were no abortion clinics scheduling an appointment at the time researchers contacted them. In an additional 30 metropolitan areas — about 13 percent — the earliest appointment was more than two weeks away.”