New Research Shows People Are Moving Out of Abortion-Banned States

In the 2.5 years since the Supreme Court struck down a federal right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling, research has shown that state abortion bans are impacting where young people are choosing to go to college, and where doctors and medical students are open to practicing medicine. Throughout 2023—the first full year after Dobbs—171,300 patients had to travel out-of-state to receive in-clinic abortions.

Now, a new analysis from economists at Georgia Institute of Technology and The College of Wooster, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows people are moving out of states that have banned abortion post-Dobbs.

Economists tracked migration within the 13 states that enacted total abortion bans shortly after Dobbs in June 2022. Their tracking spans from July 2018 to June 2023. They found that these states collectively lost 36,000 per quarter after Dobbs. Almost 129,000 people moved out of abortion-banned states from June 2022 to June 2023, researchers found. This was calculated using the difference between the number of people leaving the states versus those migrating into the state.

Researchers didn’t discern whether those leaving or entering the states were men or women. But men are deeply impacted by abortion laws, too, sometimes as fathers of young daughters, or partners concerned about what might happen to their partner if she experiences pregnancy complications. In Texas and Georgia, there have been several reported cases of women dying from denied or delayed emergency abortions, or because they were too afraid of being punished by abortion laws to seek medical help at all. In September, a different study showed that states with more abortion restrictions offered substantially less access to paid family leave, health care, food and child care assistance, and other family-supportive policies.

The study’s conclusion states “that state-level abortion bans following the Dobbs decision increased net migration outflows, highlighting that reproductive healthcare access has a measurable effect on residential decisions.” Over a five-year period, the researchers estimate that states that ban abortion could lose 1% of their population. 

“In terms of the implications for states’ economies, our results suggest that employers in states with bans may face challenges in attracting and retaining workers, especially younger workers, which could impact economic growth and development,” the Georgia Institute of Technology and The College of Wooster economists told CBS in an email this week.

In 2022, weeks after Dobbs, a survey showed that women under 40 overwhelmingly want to work for employers in states where abortion is legal. (Nonetheless, just this week, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’s requiring safety and content moderators to move from California to Texas, which enforces a total abortion ban, to combat so-called “political bias” among these employees.) Another 2022 poll from Axios found six in 10 people ages 18 to 29 said state abortion laws sway their decision on where to live from “somewhat” to “a lot.”

Abortion is fundamentally an economic issue: The famous Turnaway Study shows that, on top of a range of consequences including greater risk of long-term domestic violence, seeking and being denied an abortion often pushes people and their children deeper into poverty. This new study offers deeper insights into how abortion laws affect not just individuals’ economic situations, but the economies of entire states.

The vast costs surrounding abortion bans “can set [abortion seekers] back for a long time,” Serra Sippel, interim executive director of the Brigid Alliance to fund abortion-related travel, told Jezebel last year. “The short-sightedness of imposing these bans, the impact it has on the economic infrastructure when so many people are going to lose wages, lose jobs, lose housing—the ripple effect is massive.”