The finding is important because the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, that concerns abortion law in Texas. The court will decide the constitutionality of a 2013 law requiring the state’s abortion clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers and for their doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

At the time, most of the state's clinics didn’t meet these requirements. It’s too expensive for them to make the necessary renovations, they say, and there are not enough nearby hospitals for every abortion provider to gain admitting privileges.

As a result, Texas now has just 17 abortion clinics, compared to 41 in 2012, and almost all the remaining clinics are in major cities. If the Supreme Court upholds the law, seven more clinics will likely close, leaving just 10 in operation for the 269,000-square-mile state.

As Kim Soffen reported in The New York Times’ Upshot blog, “the average Texas county is now 111 miles from the nearest clinic, up from 72 miles in 2012. This is substantially higher than the national average outside Texas, 59 miles.”

The survey from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found that self-induced abortion was more common among women who had trouble obtaining reproductive services. Women were more likely to report having tried it if they had experienced difficulty getting birth control or Pap smears or if they lived near the Mexico border. Not only are some border towns located far from abortion clinics, but Cytotec is more widely available in Mexico.

The survey authors say self-induced abortions may become more common if more abortion clinics close. “Given that the populations we found to be most familiar with abortion self-induction are among those that have been most directly affected by the closure of abortion clinics in the state,” they write, “we suspect that abortion self-induction will increase as clinic-based care becomes more difficult to access.”

The plurality of the women in the survey said they were against abortion in general, but they understood why a woman would want to self-induce.

Women’s Opinions on Self-Induced Abortion

Texas Policy Evaluation Project

It’s not clear whether the self-induced abortions reported in this survey occurred as a direct result of the state’s abortion restrictions. Overall, abortions in the state declined by 13 percent since the law was enacted. The authors speculate that these women either traveled out of state, continued their pregnancies, or took their abortions into their own hands.

In a series of interviews with women who had attempted to induce their own abortions, also released by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project this week, the cost or hassle of traveling to a clinic emerged as just one of the reasons women gave for self-induction. Often, the logistical factors intermingled with poverty or feelings of shame.