Why is it so hard in some areas?

On the East and West coast, clinics (shown as yellow dots) are fairly common, but across the more rural middle of the countries, a few clinics in a single city will serve women who need to drive from hundreds of miles away. The couple clinics in the Denver/Boulder area alone are responsible for an area larger than the entire Northeast.

Why is this? Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws single out abortion providers for unnecessarily strict regulations. One such law is a mandatory wait of 24-72 hours between a consultation and the abortion process. These laws force women driving long distances to a clinic to need a hotel stay for 1-3 nights in some areas of Texas, Michigan, and the Midwest.

Other laws contribute to what we see in this chart: the utter lack of abortion clinics that are accessible to more rural cities. TRAP laws are mandating unncessary requirements on clinics - such as mandating the size of their hallways or closets or paint color, or requiring the admitting privileges at local hospitals (something that has nothing to do with medical qualification) - and clinics who can't afford to make the required changes are forced to shut down.

These laws are shutting down clinics and making it more costly and more difficult for women to obtain an abortion if they need or want one. These laws are being passed under the guise of helping women, but requiring women to spend more money and time on this procedure is by no means helping them.