On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court deemed abortion a fundamental right under the United States Constitution.
Supporters of the decision declared that legal protection of a woman's right to an abortion is vital to the preservation of women's rights, personal freedom, and privacy.
Since Roe v. Wade, many states have enacted or attempted to enact laws limiting or regulating abortion. The rate of creating new restrictions has only increased in recent years.
The restrictions.
Some examples of these restrictions are:
laws requiring parental consent for minors to obtain abortions
parental notification laws,
spousal mutual consent laws,
spousal notification laws,
laws requiring abortions to be performed in hospitals but not clinics,
laws barring state funding for abortions,
laws banning intact dilation and extraction,
laws requiring waiting periods before abortion,
and laws mandating women read certain types of literature and/or watch a fetal ultrasound before having an abortion.
In 1976 Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, barring federal funding of abortions (except in the cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother) for poor women through the Medicaid program.
The present.
In 2013, twenty-two states enacted 70 abortion restrictions. This makes 2013 second only to 2011 in the number of new abortion restrictions enacted in a single year. To put recent trends in even sharper relief, 205 abortion restrictions were enacted over the past three years (2011-2013), but just 189 were enacted during the entire previous decade (2001-2010).
More abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011-2013 than in the entire previous decade. More are on the way.
The project.
These maps aim to visualize how restrictive each state is, based on how many clinics and providers are available for women. One can see that, especially combined with heavy legal restrictions, the distance that one lives from an abortion clinic or provider can determine whether or not one can obtain an abortion.