Latinas remain the largest group of women of color in the nation impacted by current or likely state abortion bans more than a year after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last summer.
A new analysis from the National Partnership for Women & Families and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice found that close to 6.7 million Latinas (43% of all Latinas ages 15-49) live in 26 states that have banned or are likely to ban abortions.
That’s 200,000 more Latinas than last year when the organizations estimated that almost 6.5 million Latinas were threatened by state abortion bans.
Three-quarters of the Latinas who live in states with abortion bans or restrictions are concentrated in Texas, Florida and Arizona, according to the report. They make up almost one-third of all Latinas of reproductive age in the nation.
Texas, where abortions are banned, is home to 2.9 million Latinas of reproductive age. Florida and Arizona, where abortions are restricted, are home to 1.4 million and 585,600 Latinas of reproductive age, respectively.
More providers, centers and clinics that have long served as entry points for women to receive affordable reproductive health care services such as birth control and maternity care have been closing down in states riddled with abortion bans and restrictions, Lupe Rodríguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, told the press.
“The conditions on the ground and politically have actually gotten worse in many states,” she said. “There hasn’t really been any change in terms of shifting the the political and legislative landscape to make it so that anything might have gotten better.”
Twenty-six states, most of them in the South and the Midwest, have banned or significantly restricted abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy nongovernmental organization tracking reproductive rights. Abortions remain protected in some capacity in 24 states.
More than 3.1 million Latinas affected by these current and future abortion bans are already mothers, according to the report. About 27% of them have children under age 3.
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