Dr. Diane Horvath is an OB-GYN who has worked in abortion care over the last 15 years. With training in complex family planning, she has experience seeing patients throughout all three trimesters of pregnancy. But since the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to deny access to abortion, she’s noticed a trend at her clinic in Maryland: abortion bans and gestational restrictions are forcing people who try to get abortions earlier in pregnancy are being pushed to get them later in pregnancy.

“When people decide they want an abortion, they want to have it as soon as possible — nobody waits until they're 30 weeks and decides, 'Well, I think I'll just have an abortion now.' That just doesn't happen,” Horvath told Salon. “What has happened with a lot of our patients is that they've been trying to have an abortion for months, and the costs and barriers start to compound and become insurmountable until people are later in pregnancy.”

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Horvath elaborated that a common situation is this: somebody lives in a state with a near-total abortion ban, for example, Alabama or Florida, which has a six-week limit, a cut-off that occurs before many people even know they're pregnant. Abortion in their state isn’t an option by the time they find out they are pregnant, and for one reason or another, they don’t have access to medication abortion. They start researching getting access to care out of state. They get an appointment a few weeks out, but by that time they will have surpassed that state’s gestational limit. Then they have to start from square one again.

“It’s not hard to imagine how three, four or six weeks could pass while you navigate this,” Horvath said, noting........

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