A new study from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project estimated that between 100,000 and 240,000 women between the ages of 18 and 49 have at some point attempted to end their pregnancies on their own. The high incidence is thought to be the result of two factors: more restrictive abortion laws that have caused the state to go from nearly 50 abortion clinics in 2011 to just 19 now, and the availability of misoprostol, an abortion-inducing drug that is often available in Mexico without a prescription.
Prior research among women seeking abortion suggests that abortion self-induction is more common in Texas than the rest of the country. A national study of abortion patients in 2008 found that less than 2% reported taking something to try to cause an abortion for the current pregnancy prior to coming to the clinic. A study led by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project in 2012 found that 7% of abortion patients in Texas reported taking or doing something on their own to try to end their current pregnancy. [...]
Overall, 1.7% of women aged 18-49 reported that they had ever tried to end a pregnancy on their own. As noted above, since women tend to underreport abortion in surveys, this gives us a low estimate for the frequency of abortion self-induction in the general population.
When asked about their best friends, 1.8% said they were sure their best friend had done this, and an additional 2.3% said they suspected she had done this. This gives us a high estimate of 4.1% of adult women of reproductive age who have ever attempted abortion self-induction. By applying these proportions to the 5,949,149 women aged 18-49 in Texas, we estimate that somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 women in this age range have tried to end a pregnancy on their own without medical assistance.
The incidences of self-induction were found to be higher among two groups: Latina women who live in counties that border Mexico, and women who said they'd experienced trouble accessing reproductive health services like birth control and Pap smears (in some cases costs were prohibitive, and in others getting transport to the clinic had proven problematic).