Illinois serves as the abortion destination for nearly 1 in 4 people who travel out of state for care, and advocates say the state’s combination of geography, policy, and funding shows what other states should do.
The numbers come from the Guttmacher Institute, an advocacy and research organization that tracks abortion data nationally. Its latest data shows about 32,000 people traveled to Illinois for abortion care in 2025, out of an estimated 142,000 total out-of-state abortion patients that year.
At Family Planning Associates in Chicago, one of the largest independent clinics in the state, staff run a call center where a color-coded U.S. map on the wall tracks abortion access state by state. Red for restricted. Green for accessible. Illinois sits outlined in green at the center of a wide band of red, surrounded by states that ban or severely restrict the procedure.
That visual tells the policy story pretty clearly.
Geography drove the early surge
Five of Illinois’s six border states either ban abortion or make it largely inaccessible. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in 2022 and overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Illinois was immediately positioned as the closest option for patients across a wide stretch of the Midwest and South.
“Illinois really became kind of a haven state for the Midwest and much of the South immediately post-Dobbs,” said Megan Jeyifo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, which provides logistical and financial support to people seeking abortions.
Since Dobbs, 13 states have implemented near-total abortion bans. Seven others have bans that take effect at six to 12 weeks of pregnancy. That leaves patients in a wide geographic area with few options that don’t require travel, time off work, and money they may not have.
Out-of-state abortion travel peaked at 170,000 people in 2023, the year after the ruling. It dropped to roughly 155,000 in 2024, and fell again to an estimated 142,000 last year. The decline reflects, in part, the growth of medication abortion by telemedicine. About one-quarter of people who need an abortion now get medication that way, according to Guttmacher’s data. But patients in states with enforcement regimes still face prosecution risk even for that route, which pushes them toward in-person care out of state.
Illinois didn’t just get lucky on the map
Geography helps, but advocates and providers say Illinois also made deliberate investments to handle the patient volume. The state put new policies in place and directed millions of dollars toward abortion access, including support for out-of-state patients. Those investments helped clinics like Family Planning Associates absorb the surge.
That’s not the norm. Most states with legal abortion didn’t build infrastructure to receive out-of-state patients at scale.
Jeyifo and other advocates say the Illinois model should be replicated. Maine and Washington state have moved in that direction recently, with governors in both states approving funding for family planning and abortion care that explicitly covers patients traveling from out of state. The Chicago Abortion Fund has been one of the organizations helping to make the Illinois experience work in practice, covering costs for patients who can’t afford travel, lodging, or the procedure itself.
What 32,000 people represents
The 32,000 patients who came to Illinois last year aren’t an abstraction. They drove from Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and states farther south. They made appointments, arranged childcare, took days off jobs that don’t offer paid leave, and in many cases relied on funds from organizations like the Chicago Abortion Fund just to get there.
The Guttmacher data, reported by the Michigan Advance, shows the total number of people traveling for care has declined from its 2023 peak, but the share going to Illinois has held steady. That consistency reflects the state’s capacity and accessibility relative to other destination states.
For Michigan patients, Illinois remains one of the closer options when access here gets complicated. Michigan voters approved Proposal 3 in 2022, which enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, but access isn’t uniform across the state, and patients from rural areas or those facing later-term care sometimes look to Illinois providers anyway.
The map at Family Planning Associates can change at any time, as the staff note. State legislatures meet, courts issue rulings, and governors sign or veto bills. What it showed as of this spring: Illinois is still green, and most of what surrounds it is not.
