Abortion in New York is legal via state statute and Article I, Section 11 of the state constitution. Abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy require the approval of a licensed physician. The Reproductive Health Act, passed in 2019 in New York, further allows abortions past the 24th week of pregnancy if a pregnant woman's life or physical or mental health is at risk, or if the fetus is not viable. However, since these exceptions are not defined by the law, and the law carries no criminal penalties for the pregnant individual, abortion is effectively legal throughout pregnancy.
The number of abortion clinics in New York (for which more than half of all patient visits are for abortion) declined from 302 in 1982 to 95 in 2014, but increased to 113 in 2017, according to Guttmacher Institute. The abortion rate decreased from an estimated 39 abortions per 1000 women aged 15–44 in 1992 to 22 per 1000 in 2016, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
History Madame Restell opened a business that performed abortions in the 1830s in New York City. Her business remained open for around 35 years, and openly advertised its services in newspapers. She had branches in several other cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, and employed traveling agents working for the company that sold her "Female Monthly Pills". New York state saw many women dying during the 1860s and 1870s due to using unskilled abortion providers. Some of these deaths were highly publicized, which turned the public's attitude against abortions. In 1918, Margaret Sanger was charged under the New York law against disseminating contraceptive information. On appeal, her conviction was reversed because contraceptive devices could legally be promoted to cure and prevent disease.
A group of science, health, and medical experts met in 1955 in New York; their purpose was to discuss abortion in the United States. Their belief was that between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions took place annually. Planned Parenthood Federation of America had a conference at Arden House in New York in 1955. The conference's purpose was to review the knowledge framework in the United States as it related to abortion. One of the accomplishments of the conference was that it published the "first objective and quantitative estimates of illegal abortions". The conference also provided participants with a first-hand perspective on the state of abortion in the country, from a presentation by a physician who had performed over 5,000 abortions.
In 1955, Sloane Hospital in New York created a hospital review board to approve all abortion requests. Consequently, the number of abortions performed at the hospital in the next five-year period for therapeutic reasons was half what it was prior to 1955. According to Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, hospital review committees taught doctors to only refer cases they thought would be approved, saying: "Many physicians are discouraged by telephone conversations or corridor consultation with a single Committee member."
At Harlem Hospital, before the legalization of abortion in New York in 1970, there was a positive correlation between neonatal and perinatal mortality and the number of clandestine and non-medical community abortions. In the 1940s and 1950s, abortions would be given to some women on mental health waivers at Mount Sinai if they indicated they had attempted to commit suicide as a result of the pregnancy. At one New York City hospital, in the pre-Roe v. Wade period, a teenage girl asked for an abortion, citing suicide attempts as the reason; the hospital committee initially turned her down and hospitalized her, and the girl continued to try to kill herself. The waiver was finally granted, in order to stop the disruption the girl caused at the hospital.
Because of the nature of their abortion laws, New York City and the District of Columbia became destination centers for women in 1971 who were seeking legal abortions.
Abortion was legalized up to the 24th week of pregnancy in New York in 1970, three years before it was legalized for the entire United States with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Roe v. Wade was later overturned in 2022 by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
Legislative history
The first statute to criminalize abortion in New York State was enacted in 1827. This law made post-quickening abortions a felony, and made pre-quickening abortions a misdemeanor. New York later allowed abortions up to the 24th week of pregnancy. New York was the first state to create a therapeutic exemption that allowed women to have abortions if their life was at risk by continuing the pregnancy. In 1845, New York passed a statute that said women who had abortions could be given a prison sentence of three months to a year. They were one of the few states at the time to have laws punishing women for getting abortions. Susannah Lattin's death led to an investigation that resulted in regulating maternity clinics and adoptions in New York City in 1868. In 1872, New York state made it a penalty to perform an abortion, with a criminal sentence of between 4 and 20 years in prison.
The New York State legislature amended their abortion-related statute in 1965 to allow for more therapeutic exceptions.
On April 10, 1970, the New York Senate passed a law legalizing abortion until the 24th week of pregnancy. Republican Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the bill into law the next day. At the time, New York State was a Republican "trifecta", meaning both chambers of the legislature and the governorship were Republican-controlled. The 1970 law did several things. First, it added a consent provision requiring a physician to obtain the woman's consent before performing an abortion.1 Laws of the State of New York Passed at the One Hundred and Ninety-Third Session of the Legislature, ch. 127, at 852 (1970), available online. Second, it permitted physician-provided elective abortion services within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, or to preserve the woman's life. Third, it permitted a woman, when acting upon the advice of a duly licensed physician, to perform an "abortional act" on herself within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, or to preserve her life. New York was the second state, after Hawaii, to enact landmark abortion law legislation. Unlike Hawaii, however, New York's abortion law did not have a 90-day residency requirement.
Between 1970 and 1973, the New York General Assembly attempted to repeal their law that made abortion legal. Governor Rockefeller successfully vetoed the repeal attempt.
Cities like Baltimore, Austin, and New York passed legislation to require Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) to disclose that they did not offer abortion services, but organizations representing the CPCs have been successful in courts challenging these laws, principally on the argument that forcing the CPCs to post such language violated their First Amendment rights, and constituted compelled speech. Whereas the previous attempts at regulating CPCs in Baltimore and other cities were based on having signage that informed the patient that the CPC did not offer abortion-related services, the FACT Act instead makes the patient aware of state-sponsored services that are available, rather than what the CPCs did or did not offer. The law went into effect January 1, 2016. The state legislature was one of five states nationwide that tried, and failed, to pass a "fetal heartbeat" bill in 2014. The terminology of these bills is largely contested, and considered to be inaccurate by medical professionals. This is because at the proposed time (as early as 6 weeks), the conceptus is not yet considered a fetus, and is actually an embryo. Additionally, there is no heart present in the embryo; it would more accurately be called a cluster of cells with electrical activity.
As of May 14, 2019, the state prohibited abortions after the fetus was viable, generally some point between week 24 and 28. This period uses a standard defined by the US Supreme Court in 1973, with the Roe v. Wade ruling. In 2019, New York passed the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), which repealed a pre-Roe provision that banned third-trimester abortions, except in cases where the continuation of the pregnancy endangered a pregnant woman's life. The law said: "The legislature finds that comprehensive reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion, is a fundamental component of a woman's health, privacy, and equality." The bill also allowed qualified health practitioners to perform abortions, not just licensed medical doctors.
In November 2024, New York voters passed a referendum to amend the state constitution to protect the right to abortion. and will take effect on January 1, 2025.NY Const. art. XIX, §1
Judicial history The US Supreme Court's decision in 1973's Roe v. Wade ruling meant the state could no longer regulate abortion in the first trimester. However, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, later in 2022. Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York was before the US Supreme Court in 1997. Two abortion clinics in western New York had obtained injunctions to prevent anti-abortion rights protesters from blockading their facilities, or engaging in other types of disruptive protests. The Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that "floating buffer zones" preventing protesters approaching people entering or leaving abortion clinics were unconstitutional, though "fixed buffer zones" around the clinics themselves remained constitutional. The Court's upholding the fixed buffer was the most important aspect of the ruling, because it was a common feature of injunctions nationwide.
Clinic history
In the 1940s, police would raid suspected illegal abortion clinics. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of abortion clinics in the state decreased by thirteen, going from 302 in 1982 to 289 in 1992. The number of abortion providers in New York was 266 in 1996. In the period between 1992 and 1996, the state ranked third in the loss of number of abortion clinics, losing 23 to have a total of 266 in 1996. In 2008, the states with the most providers were California with 522 and New York with 249. In 2014, there were 95 abortion clinics in New York, and 44% of the counties in the state did not have an abortion clinic. That year, 10% of women in the state aged 15–44 lived in a county without an abortion clinic. In 2017, there were 58 Planned Parenthood clinics, of which 49 offered abortion services, in a state with a population of 4,718,933 women aged 15–49.
A study was done involving 300 women approached by anti-abortion protesters at an abortion clinic in Buffalo, New York. It found that while some women were upset by the protesters, none of the 300 women changed their minds as a result of protester's actions in relation to their decision to get an abortion.
Statistics In 1972, an estimated 100,000 women traveled to New York to have legal abortions. Over half of them traveled more than 500 miles to get a legal abortion in the state. In 1990, 2,443,000 women in the state had a reported unintended pregnancy. The highest number of legal induced abortions by the state in 2000 occurred in New York (94,466), while Florida was second (88,563), and Texas was third (76,121). In 2001, New York had the highest number of induced abortions (91,792), while Idaho had the lowest induced abortion to live birth ratio, at 36 per 1,000 live births. In 2010, the state of New York had 45,722 publicly funded abortions, of which none were federally funded and all were state-funded.