Trust Women, Wichita’s largest abortion provider, saw more than 5,000 patients last year. That’s more than triple the number who came in 2021, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
by Suzanne King
As abortion bans have multiplied across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, so have abortions.
And cities like Wichita, in states where the procedure remains legal, see a steady rise in patients coming for the procedure.
Last year, Trust Women, Wichita’s largest abortion provider, saw just over 5,000 patients. That’s the highest number in the clinic’s history and more than triple what it saw in 2021, the year before the court struck down federal abortion protections.
“It’s not that we’re seeing more Kansas patients,” said Zach Gingrich-Gaylord, the clinic’s communication director. “We’re now a majority out-of-state provider.”
Even though 14 states have banned abortion since the high court overturned Roe, more women underwent the procedure last year than the year before, according to national numbers released Tuesday.
As abortion bans have multiplied across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, so have abortions.
And cities like Wichita, in states where the procedure remains legal, see a steady rise in patients coming for the procedure.
Last year, Trust Women, Wichita’s largest abortion provider, saw just over 5,000 patients. That’s the highest number in the clinic’s history and more than triple what it saw in 2021, the year before the court struck down federal abortion protections.
“It’s not that we’re seeing more Kansas patients,” said Zach Gingrich-Gaylord, the clinic’s communication director. “We’re now a majority out-of-state provider.”
Even though 14 states have banned abortion since the high court overturned Roe, more women underwent the procedure last year than the year before, according to national numbers released Tuesday.
The Guttmacher Institute, a national organization that has been tracking the number of abortions in the United States since 1973, said last year was the first time since 2012 when abortions topped 1 million in the U.S.
The group estimates the country saw 15.7 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age last year, a 10% jump since 2020. Guttmacher’s news release said the number is “almost certainly an undercount” because it only includes abortions that occurred at brick-and-mortar health facilities, such as clinics or doctors’ offices, and the prescribing of abortion pills through telehealth and virtual providers.
States without total abortion bans, Guttmacher said, saw a 25% increase in abortions last year over 2020. And states like Kansas that border states with bans saw abortions rise even more.
Guttmacher says 71% of abortions in Kansas last year were provided to patients from out of the state, compared to 52% of patients in 2020. About 8,300 more patients came to Kansas for abortions in 2023 — accounting for 89% of the increase in abortions in the state over 2020.
That’s the same trend Trust Women in Wichita has seen. Gingrich-Gaylord said more than 80% of the women getting abortions at the clinic come from another state. Of those, just over half are from Texas, about 20% are from Oklahoma and the rest are from other states including Louisiana and Arkansas.
Trust Women has tripled its clinic staff and doubled the number of clinic days when abortions are performed in order to help meet the growing demand. Like many abortion providers, Gingrich-Gaylord said, Trust Women relies on a network of about two dozen traveling physicians.
“That’s just a fact of the hostility of the environment around here,” he said. “It’s very hard to find local providers.”
Kansas surprised the country in 2022, just a month after the court overturned Roe, by voting down an amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state’s constitution after an expensive election. The state became the first in the country to shore up abortion rights after national protections went away. That made Kansas, still home to some of the toughest clinic restrictions in the country, an abortion destination.
Trust Women was founded in 2013 to reestablish abortion care in the clinic that had been operated by Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist in 2009. The clinic has been the target of anti-abortion protests for decades.
The increase in the number of abortions nationally relies on a growing network of advocacy groups providing support to women who don’t have legal access near their homes or in the states where they live.
Groups like the Midwest Access Coalition, founded 10 years ago, help cover expenses that come with having to leave home to get an abortion.
So far in 2024, the group has helped more than 565 people pay for things like transportation, hotels and child care. In the first quarter of 2023, the group had helped about 450 people.
This year’s numbers include 163 people who got help going to Kansas, including 95 who went to Aria Medical in Wichita, a clinic that only provides medical abortions; 53 who went to Trust Women and eight who went to Planned Parenthood in Wichita.
Midwest Access Coalition also helped four people get to Planned Parenthood in Overland Park, and another three who went to Planned Parenthood in Wyandotte County.
Alison Dreith, director of strategic partnerships for the coalition, said about half of patients don’t make their first abortion appointment because of a long list of practical barriers that get in the way.
“We book and pay for accommodations, transportation, food, child care, incidentals, any other thing that has a financial number attached to it that a client needs help to access their care,” she said.
Dreith said the group gets financial support from individual and institutional donors like foundations, and saw support surge after the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2022.
The National Abortion Federation said it saw a similar uptick in traffic to its hotline after the court’s ruling. In a December press release, the group said it was paying for significantly more hotel rooms, transportation tickets and rideshares than it was before the ruling.
In a statement, Veronica Jones, chief operating officer of the federation, said the rise showed that “demand for abortion care is not going away simply because it has been banned.”
The Guttmacher Institute also said Tuesday that medication abortions, which have become more widely available thanks to changing regulations, are also on the rise. The group says medication abortions accounted for 63% of all abortions in the U.S. last year, compared with 53% of abortions in 2020. On March 26, The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that challenges the use of mifepristone, one of the medications commonly used in medical abortions. Experts have said the case could lead to more restrictions.
Trust Women in Wichita is regularly the backdrop of abortion protesters, who would like to see abortion banned in Kansas as it has been in many neighboring states.
This year, the state Legislature is exploring ways to reduce the number of abortions in the state, like requiring patients to explain why they’re ending a pregnancy. They also want to send more money to maternity homes, adoption assistance groups and anti-abortion counseling centers in the state.
One of those centers, Choices Medical Clinic, is next door to Trust Women. Gingrich-Gaylord alleges that the clinic and others like it use intentionally deceptive marketing to lure women with appointments for abortions to Trust Women to come there instead.
“We’ll have patients who have been bamboozled,” he said. “If you’re from Texas, and you’re already in an unfamiliar place, you’re already scared, you’ve been stigmatized — kicked out of your own state … and you come and you have the choice between, you know, the privacy fence (that surrounded Trust Women’s clinic) and the welcoming-looking place.”
In the past, Gingrich-Gaylord said, patients have chosen the Choices Medical and been misled into believing they can’t get the abortion they came to Wichita for.
“Maybe they tell you that you’ve already missed the appointment,” he said. “They give you incorrect ultrasound information, saying you’re late or too early, you have more time. … And now you’re in a much different situation..”
Choices Medical Clinic had not responded to a request for a response before publication.
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Wichita Beacon