(Radio Iowa) – A report finds the number of abortions performed in Iowa dropped last year, the first full year of the state’s law banning abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions.
The report from the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, shows there were just over three-thousand clinician-provided abortions in Iowa last year, a 22-percent decrease from the year before.
Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist with the institute, says the drop doesn’t mean Iowans aren’t accessing abortions elsewhere. “We’d expect that many Iowans are probably traveling out of state for care,” Maddow-Zimet says. “That’s something that we already were starting to see in 2024 and likely have accelerated in 2025.”
He says the data indicate many Iowans are crossing state lines to obtain abortions. “It really is a major way that people are still accessing care,” Maddow Zimet says. “It’s still requiring an enormous amount of resources to support that travel, and it can be a pretty significant burden on folks.”
He says most Iowans are going to neighboring states like Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska for care.
