In the post-Roe America that abortion rights advocates say they have long seen coming, pregnant women in many states will scrape together money, book hotels, arrange child care and board buses, trains and planes bound for places that provide safe abortions. New York will be one of them.
For New York, that would represent a return to the years before Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion. The state legalized the procedure in 1970, three years before the Supreme Court ruling, and soon became a sanctuary for out-of-state patients seeking to terminate their pregnancies.
The New York law allowed abortions within 24 weeks of pregnancy, and at any time if the woman’s life was at risk. In the two years after it passed, nearly two-thirds of an estimated 402,000 abortions performed in New York City were for women who had come from elsewhere, health officials estimated.
