Cambridge, MA, June 23, 2023 – On June 24, 2022, The US Supreme Court released a final decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated constitutional protections of the right to abortion care established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. While the protections granted by Roe v. Wade were never adequate in ensuring abortion access for everyone, over the last year, the impacts of losing them have been heartbreaking and created a human rights and public health crisis. Since last June, 26 states have enacted abortion bans or restrictions, an estimated 93,575 fewer abortions were recorded in states that banned or severely restricted abortion (compared with the previous baseline), and tens of thousands of abortion-seekers have had to cross state lines and travel extreme distances in order to access essential health care and exercise their fundamental right to bodily autonomy.
These ongoing attacks on abortion access, alongside an onslaught of restrictions on gender-affirming care, contraception, and other reproductive health care, have disproportionately impacted Black people, Indigenous peoples, AANHPI and Latine people, other folks of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people to working to make ends meet – communities that already faced the highest barriers to health care access due to systemic racism and other systems of oppression. Ibis stands in solidarity with these communities, as well as our provider and community-based partners who have borne some of the greatest impacts of these restrictions as they continue their critical work to help people access respectful, safe, and inclusive abortion care in their communities.
Ibis remains committed to responding to this human rights and public health crisis by generating and disseminating rigorous evidence in principled partnership with our reproductive justice and community-based partners. We seek to use this research to amplify the voices of those communities most impacted, highlight the barriers to care that people face and the solutions that will work for them, and identify and test innovative strategies to address these challenges. For example, we are:
- Investing in solutions like Euki, a comprehensive, inclusive, and secure period tracking and SRH app that does not store any end user data to ensure the safety and privacy of users.
- Building on the findings of Ibis’s SAFE study to continue to underscore the safety and effectiveness of the misoprostol-only protocol for medication abortion, as a means for expanding access to additional methods of safe, effective abortion care, especially in light of attempts to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.
- Conducting ongoing research to understand the sexual and reproductive health needs of communities – including Black women, transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive (TGE) people, AANHPI communities, and those living in Midwestern states with increasing restrictions on abortion – to lift up recommendations and opportunities for addressing this human rights and public health crisis.
Attacks on abortion, gender-affirming care, and contraception are attacks on all of our human rights and are part of a larger political agenda to take away essential health care from our communities. They also ignore the extensive evidence demonstrating that such restrictions cause great harm to individuals’ and families’ health and well-being. As we continue to navigate the changing legal landscape in the United States and beyond, Ibis remains committed working with our partners to expand access to abortion care and other essential reproductive health care so that everyone – no matter who they are or where they live – can get the resources and care they need to control their lives and futures. Our collective liberation depends on it.