Abortion Reporting: Louisiana (2024)

In January 2026, Louisiana’s Department of Health (LA DOH) published a suppressed abortion total for both 2023 and 2024 for confidentiality reasons, meaning that fewer than five abortions occurred in the state for both years. While Louisiana uploaded components of each year’s reports for different data points, such as abortions by weeks of gestation and type of procedure, all totals were also suppressed.

Louisiana’s statute code La. R.S. §14: 87.1 defines abortion as “the performance of any act with the intent to terminate a clinically diagnosable pregnancy with knowledge that the termination by those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the unborn child, whether or not the child will survive, by one or more of the following means:

• (i) Administering, prescribing, or providing any abortion-inducing drug, potion, medicine, or any other substance, device, or means to a pregnant female.
• (ii) Using an instrument or external force on a pregnant female.”

After Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, the state prohibited abortion from conception in Louisiana facilities except in cases where a continued pregnancy threatened the life or physical health of the mother (La R.S. §40: 1061).¹  Another provision within Louisiana’s statute code La R.S. §14:87.1 (cited above) explicitly excludes “the removal of an unborn child who is deemed to be medically futile” from the state’s definition of abortion.²  This, in effect, adds a fetal anomaly exception to the state’s abortion prohibition. In August 2022, the LA DOH issued an emergency rule that provided an exclusive list of the conditions that the DOH considers to render a child medically futile as it relates to the state’s abortion law. Examples of included conditions are anencephaly, bilateral renal agenesis, and trisomy 13.

All that can be taken from the tables published by the state is that, in 2024, four abortions were performed via dilation and evacuation on the following:

• A black, unmarried woman, aged 35-39, who was in her 14^th week of gestation
• A black woman of unknown marital status, aged 20-24, in her 15^th week of gestation
• A white, married woman, aged 35-39, in her 16^th week of gestation
• A black, unmarried woman, aged 25-29, in her 19^th week of gestation

The reasons for all the (suppressed) abortions were listed as “other.” Other options included the mental health of the mother, the physical health of the mother, risk of fetal deformity, and rape or incest. However, neither rape, incest, nor the mental health of the mother, are allowable exceptions under Louisiana law, so it is unclear why the state included those categories in its tables.

For the first time since the state started reporting abortion data in 1999, Louisiana published abortion complications data. In 2024, the LA DOH received 33 abortion complication reports. Twenty-one reports were submitted from unknown abortion facilities, fewer than 10 (the true number was suppressed) from out-of-state abortion facilities, and fewer than 10 reports were submitted from “other/no facility listed.”

In years past, due to a statutory mandate (La R.S. 40:1061.21), the state has published information on the number of abortions performed on minors. However, Louisiana did not do so for 2023 or 2024 because it appears no abortions were performed on a minor in 2024, and the abortion(s) reported as being performed on a 15–19-year-old in 2023 may not have been a minor.

This article will not summarize Louisiana’s 2023 abortion data.

The data published by the state does not include the total number of abortions obtained by Louisiana residents out of state or the number of self-managed abortions performed outside of the healthcare system. The data also does not include the number of mail-order abortion drugs obtained by Louisiana residents prescribed by licensed abortionists in other states with shield laws. Below, CLI will describe data provided by the Guttmacher Institute’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study that details the total number of Louisiana women who traveled out of state to obtain an abortion in 2024. CLI will also describe data from the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount project that details the number of abortion drugs mailed to Louisiana women.

Guttmacher Data

In 2024, Guttmacher estimated that 2,020 Louisiana women traveled out of state to obtain abortions. For the number of abortions obtained by Louisiana women in other states according to Guttmacher in 2024 (and compared to 2023), see the following table:³

The change in where Louisiana women traveled out of state to obtain abortions in 2023 compared to 2024 does not seem to be primarily explained by other states’ changing abortion laws. For example, on May 1, 2024, Florida’s law prohibiting abortion after six weeks of gestation, except in limited cases, went into effect, and subsequently, the number of Louisiana women traveling to Florida to obtain an abortion decreased by 1,170 women from 2023 to 2024. However, one would expect the number of Louisiana women traveling to states where abortion remains legally and widely accessible to increase, but that did not occur (only in Virginia and Kansas). In fact, in states where abortion remains largely legal throughout pregnancy (California and Illinois), or there is no gestational limit (Colorado and Maryland), the number of Louisiana women traveling to the state to get an abortion decreased from 2023 to 2024.

This overall decrease in Louisiana women traveling out of state from 2023 to 2024 could be partially explained by the increase in Louisiana women who obtained abortion drugs from out-of-state prescribers operating under shield laws. According to SFP’s #WeCount estimate, in 2024, abortion drugs were mailed to 7,530 women in Louisiana. In July of 2023 (when SFP started including shield law abortions in their estimates) through December of 2023, abortion drugs were mailed to 2,480 women in Lousiana. During the same period in 2024 (the last six months of the year), 3,980 Louisiana women were mailed abortion drugs.⁴

Legal Developments

Since the passage of shield laws in eight states that allow abortionists licensed in pro-abortion states to ship abortion drugs into states with abortion prohibitions, the state of Louisiana has filed two related lawsuits. In early 2025, Louisiana tried to extradite a New York abortionist after a state grand jury indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter for “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.” Carpenter allegedly sent the drugs to a Louisiana woman in April 2024, who reportedly ordered them online and coerced her minor daughter to take them against her will.   Abortion coercion is a crime in Louisiana. The drugs killed the unborn child, whom the minor reportedly wanted to keep and had even planned a gender reveal party for, and landed the minor in the hospital. In response to this indictment and extradition request, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, “I will never, under any circumstances, turn this doctor over to the state of Louisiana under any extradition request.”

Similarly, in January 2026, Louisiana tried to extradite a California doctor, Remy Coeytaux, for providing a Louisiana resident with abortion drugs using California’s shield law in 2023, which operates virtually the same as New York’s mentioned above. Coeytaux is also being charged with “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.” Similar to New York Governor Hochul, California’s Governor, Gavin Newsom, refused the extradition request and said, “California protects patients and their doctors. We will not be complicit in efforts to strip away their privacy, autonomy, or dignity.” According to the state’s extradition document cited above, Coeytaux provided the Louisiana woman with abortion drugs through the organization Aid Access, with which Coeytaux partners.

1. Louisiana’s “life at conception” law was triggered into effect by the overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. However, the law was temporarily blocked on June 27, 2022. It went back into effect on July 8, 2022, until July 12, 2022, when it was blocked again. On July 29, 2022, the temporary injunction was lifted, and the law has remained in effect ever since.
2. Louisiana’s “life at conception” law (SB 33) was passed as a trigger law in 2006. This version of the law contained exceptions for the mother’s life or physical health. However, the law’s “medically futile” exception was added to the law on June 17, 2022, when SB342 was signed into law by former Governor Edwards.
3.  Guttmacher’s travel and residence data can be found here (State_Abortion_Travel_2024.csv) and (State_Abortion_Travel_2023.csv). This information is updated as of February 12, 2026.
4. #WeCount’s data can be found here by downloading the “Report data tables [.xlsx]” document. The #WeCount report specifies that the numbers included in their tables for abortions performed under shield laws only represent the number of women whom abortion drugs were sent to, not the number of drug-induced abortions that were a result of the mailed drugs. However, because #WeCount’s data is the only source of data that delineates the number of abortions by mode of provision (in-person, telehealth/mail-order, and/or abortion drugs obtained under shield laws), their data is the best available.

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