The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization erasing the federal constitutional right to an abortion has created a country divided between states aggressively moving to criminalize a wide range of abortion-related activity and states aggressively supporting the provision of abortion services. For the tens of millions of women and girls living in states hostile to abortion, one important option is to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. In anticipation of this prospect, anti-abortion legislators and advocates are discussing measures that would punish those who seek abortion services in other states, as well as those assisting them.

Efforts to trap women and girls in abortion-hostile states or to deter supporters from entering those states should run squarely into the right to travel across state lines, which dates back to the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, in Dobbs one of the concurring conservative justices specifically endorsed the notion that the right to travel protects access to abortion services in other states. But as with “abortion,” “travel” nowhere appears in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s right-to-travel rulings are sparse and arguably more vulnerable to reversal than was the court’s abortion jurisprudence until the conservative justices obliterated it in Dobbs. Given the essential role interstate travel may play in the coming abortion battles, a closer examination of the right to travel is in order.

Early History