In 1973, Roe v. Wade granted a nationwide right to abortion and helped create a path to access.
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But, abortion access has rarely been a straight line — it’s full of twists, turns, and roadblocks.
And these barriers have only gotten more complicated since the US Supreme Court gave states the power to ban abortion in 2022’s Dobbs ruling.
While 13 states completely outlawed abortion, with many additional states dismantling access in other ways…
…other states have moved to strengthen their protections, creating a complicated patchwork of laws across the country.
To illustrate how difficult it is to get abortion care, we built a maze for each state where the difficulty is calculated by the state’s abortion policies.
This is...
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To help you navigate the mazes we've highlighted 6 individual abortion stories.
These stories were sourced from news reports, but some identifying characteristics have been changed.
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Select a state maze to try to solve it. States with plus signs have personal stories.
Methodology
The six personal stories included in this piece from “Ava”, “Billie”, “Courtney”, “Nicki”, “Margot”, and “Simone” were sourced from actual news reports, including reporting by CNN, The Indianapolis Star, Michigan Public Radio, Propublica, The New York Times, The 19th, The Tennessean, Texas Public Radio, and The Washington Post. Sometimes details were combined from multiple true stories to create a full narrative. Names, ages, and states were altered to protect the privacy and anonymity of the individuals. The illustrations for these stories were done by Maria Scherlies.
To calculate the complexity of each state maze, 28 state-level data points from the Guttmacher Institute were collected, normalized, weighted, and combined to produce a complexity score. Abortion bans were weighted at 10, with ban exceptions and constitutional measures weighted at 5. Other policies and laws aimed at limiting abortion access were weighted at 2. Other reproductive health policies, like sexual education and contraception access, were weighted at 1.
Our complexity calculations were last updated on October 17, 2024 and represent a snapshot in time. The mazes may not represent the current ever-evolving abortion landscape in each state due to ongoing legal challenges, court rulings, and new legislation.
Mazes were generated using a depth first search algorithm, with a size and difficulty that matched the complexity score.
The full list of data points, sources, and when they were last updated by Guttmacher Institute is below.