More than 14,000 Texas patients crossed the border into New Mexico for an abortion last year. An additional 16,000 left Southern states bound for Illinois. And nearly 12,000 more traveled north from South Carolina and Georgia to North Carolina.

These were among the more than 171,000 patients who traveled for an abortion in 2023, new estimates show, demonstrating both the upheaval in access since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the limits of state bans to stop the procedure. The data also highlights the unsettled nature of an issue that will test politicians up and down the ballot in November.

Out-of-state travel for abortions — either to have a procedure or obtain abortion pills — more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions.

Most traveling patients went to the next closest state that allowed abortions. But those in the South, where 13 states banned or restricted the procedure, had to go farther.

One traveler was a 24-year-old woman from Columbus, Ga., who asked to be identified by only her first initial, A. She flew to New York City last summer after discovering she was past six weeks of pregnancy, when Georgia no longer allows abortion.

She decided to travel over a weekend instead of self-managing with pills at home. “I had to go back to work on Monday,” she said. “I just didn’t have that kind of time.”

Texas, the largest state to ban abortion, had the most residents travel across state lines for the procedure, the data shows.

On the receiving end, nowhere saw more out-of-state patients — and from more states — than Illinois.

People in states where the procedure remained legal also traveled for abortions, sometimes because the closest clinic was across state lines or the influx of out-of-state patients made appointments scarce. The data shows that abortions rose in nearly every state where they remained legal.

Many traveling patients faced multiday trips, lost income and child care costs. Some patients were unable to travel. Earlier research found that in the first half of 2023, almost a quarter of women living in states with near-total bans — who may have otherwise sought an abortion — did not get one.

“Abortion is one of the most common procedures in medicine,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs clinics in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia.

“We’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting,” she said. “Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.”

The new estimates of resident and out-of-state abortions come from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, and they offer the first detailed picture of the interstate travelers who helped push the number of abortions nationwide to a high in 2023. The researchers surveyed a sample of clinics in each state where abortion remained legal to estimate the number of abortions.

For some anti-abortion groups, the feeling of victory after the overturn of Roe has been dimmed by the number of people circumventing abortion bans — and the lack of political will to address the issue in an election year.

“We’re agitating some of the Republicans who would be very comfortable spiking the football, patting themselves on the back, running for re-election, and then focusing on other issues that they’re more interested in,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life.

“We’ve never had a sense of finality. We’ve only seen the other side escalate their efforts to promote abortion,” he added.

The availability of abortion pills has significantly blunted the impact of many state bans. But some patients still must travel to see a provider because of a medical condition or how far along they are in pregnancy. Others simply prefer it.

“I didn’t want the pills to get delivered to my school,” said Mia, 20, a college student in Houston who asked to be identified by only her first name. Instead, last August, she drove 12 hours to an Albuquerque clinic. “In case anything went wrong, I didn’t know if I could go to a hospital,” she said. “I figured it would be best to go in person and that way I’d know that it was taken care of.”

The clinic covered the procedure’s cost, but Mia paid around $500 for gas, two nights at an Airbnb and Uber rides to get to and from her appointment.

The explosion of out-of-state travel has been met with support from abortion clinics and abortion funds, which expanded access to services and financial support for patients.

“Now we have places where people who’ve been driving all night can nap in our clinics,” said Ms. Hagstrom Miller. “We have couches. We have waiting rooms specifically for children, with toys. We bring in sandwiches and food.”

States with liberal abortion laws have also played a significant role.

“It looks like the protective policies that the states are enacting do matter,” said Kelly Baden, the vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “But we should not be normalizing the reliance on networks of volunteers and donations.”

Illinois has invested upwards of $23 million into expanding abortion access and reproductive health care since 2022. Providers in the state have extended clinic hours and increased staffing and the availability of hospital-based abortion care.

“Things are running along very smoothly,” said Dr. Allison Cowett, the medical director at Family Planning Associates, a Chicago clinic whose patient volume has doubled since 2018. “We’ve caught up to the speed of things. This is our new normal.”

The Chicago Abortion Fund provides, on average, about $880 to each patient seeking an abortion in Illinois, up from around $545 in 2022, thanks to donations and city and state grants.

“It still feels precarious — you don’t know when the priority of a single institution or a single foundation will change,” said Megan Jeyifo, the fund’s executive director.

In Florida, the fight over abortion restrictions is far from over, with consequences for women across the South. The state had an 18 percent rise in abortions last year, including nearly 10,000 out-of-state patients.

A six-week ban that took effect in May has already upended those patterns, and advocates are asking voters to preserve abortion rights in the state’s Constitution in November.

For now, the closest state offering abortions later than six weeks in pregnancy is North Carolina, which requires counseling and a 72-hour waiting period.

“It’s a logistical nightmare,” said Kelly Flynn, the chief executive of A Woman’s Choice, which has clinics in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. To save patients two trips out of Florida, physicians at her Florida clinic are licensed in North Carolina so that they can perform the mandatory counseling before the patient travels north.

OpenAI is building an international team of lobbyists as it seeks to influence politicians and regulators who are increasing their scrutiny over powerful artificial intelligence.

The San Francisco-based start-up told the Financial Times it has expanded the number of staff on its global affairs team from three at the start of 2023 to 35. The company aims to build that up to 50 by the end of 2024.

The push comes as governments explore and debate legislation around AI safety that risk constraining the start-up’s growth and the development of its cutting-edge models, which underpin products such as ChatGPT.

“We are not approaching this from a perspective of we just need to get in there and quash regulations . . . because we don’t have a goal of maximising profit; we have a goal of making sure that AGI benefits all of humanity,” said Anna Makanju, OpenAI’s vice-president of government affairs, referring to artificial general intelligence, or the point that machines have equivalent cognitive abilities to humans.

While forming a small part of OpenAI’s 1,200 employees, the global affairs department is the company’s most international unit, strategically positioned in locations where AI legislation is advanced. This includes stationing staff in Belgium, the UK, Ireland, France, Singapore, India, Brazil and the US.

However, OpenAI remains behind its Big Tech rivals in this outreach. According to public filings in the US, Meta spent a record $7.6mn engaging with the US government in the first quarter of this year, while Google spent $3.1mn and OpenAI $340,000. Regarding AI-specific advocacy, Meta has named 15 lobbyists, Google has five while OpenAI has only two.

“Walking in the door, [ChatGPT had] 100mn users [but the company had] three people to do public policy,” said David Robinson, head of policy planning at OpenAI, who joined the company in May last year after a career in academia and consulting for the White House on its AI policy.

“It was literally to the point where there would be somebody high level who would want a conversation, and there was nobody who could pick up the phone,” he added.

OpenAI’s global affairs unit does not deal with some of the most fraught regulatory cases, however. That task goes to its legal team, which handles issues related to UK and US regulators’ review of its $18bn alliance with Microsoft; the US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into whether chief executive Sam Altman misled investors during his brief ousting by the board in November; and the US Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection probe into the company.

Instead, OpenAI’s lobbyists focus on the spread of AI legislation. The UK, the US and Singapore are among many countries dealing with how to govern AI and consulting closely with OpenAI and other tech companies on proposed regulations.

The company was involved in the discussions around the EU’s AI Act, approved this year, one of the most advanced pieces of legislation in seeking to regulate powerful AI models.

OpenAI was among AI companies that argued some of its models should not be considered among those that provide a “high risk” in early drafts of the act and would therefore be subject to tougher rules, according to three people involved in the negotiations. Despite this push, the company’s most capable models will fall under the remit of the act.

OpenAI also argued against the EU’s push to examine all data given to its foundation models, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

The company told the FT that pre-training data — the data sets used to give large language models a broad understanding of language or patterns — should be outside the scope of regulation as it was a poor way of understanding an AI system’s outputs. Instead, it proposed the focus should be on post-training data used to fine-tune models for a particular task.

The EU decided that, for high-risk AI systems, regulators can still request access to the training data to ensure it is free of errors and bias.

Since the EU’s law was approved, OpenAI hired Chris Lehane, who worked for President Bill Clinton, Al Gore’s presidential campaign and was Airbnb’s policy chief as vice-president of public works. Lehane will work closely with Makanju and her team.

OpenAI also recently poached Jakob Kucharczyk, a former competition lead at Meta. Sandro Gianella, head of European policy and partnerships, joined in June last year after working at Google and Stripe, while James Hairston, head of international policy and partnerships, joined from Meta in May last year.

The company was recently involved in a series of discussions with policymakers in the US and other markets around OpenAI’s Voice Engine model, which can clone and create custom voices, leading to the company narrowing its release plans after concerns over risks of how it might be used in the context of global elections this year.

The team has been running workshops in countries facing elections this year, such as Mexico and India, and publishing guidance on misinformation. In autocratic countries, OpenAI grants one-to-one access to its models to “trusted individuals” in areas where it deems it is not safe to release the products.

One government official who worked closely with OpenAI said a different concern for the company was ensuring that any rules would be flexible in future and become outdated with new scientific or technological advancements.

OpenAI hopes to address some hangovers from the social media age, which Makanju said has led to a “general distrust of Silicon Valley companies”.

“Unfortunately, people are often seeing AI with the same lens,” she added. “We spend a lot of time making sure people understand that this technology is quite different, and the regulatory interventions that make sense for it will be very different.”

However, some industry figures are critical of OpenAI’s lobbying expansion.

“Initially, OpenAI recruited people deeply involved in AI policy and specialists, whereas now they are just hiring run-of-the-mill tech lobbyists, which is a very different strategy,” said one person who has directly engaged with OpenAI on creating legislation.

“They’re just wanting to influence legislators in ways that Big Tech has done for over a decade.”

Robinson, OpenAI’s head of planning, said the global affairs team has more ambitious goals. “The mission is safe and broadly beneficial, and so what does that mean? It means creating laws that not only let us innovate and bring beneficial technology to people but also end up in a world where the technology is safe.”

Additional reporting by Madhumita Murgia in London

LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Pro-Palestinian protesters have barricaded a building at Cal State Los Angeles, where the president of the campus is apparently stuck sheltering in place in her office, Eyewitness News has learned.

Protesters had already set up encampments on another section of campus more than a month ago. But on Wednesday a group broke off and started piling up furniture, overturned golf carts and tables to create barriers in front of the Student Services Building and surrounding plaza.

They also removed copy machines and furniture from inside the building to continue reinforcing the barricade late into the evening.

The office of Campus President Berenecea Johnson Eanes, who was appointed last year and started this January, is on the eighth floor of the building.

The college was asking employees in the Student Services Building to shelter in place, while employees elsewhere on campus were instructed to leave.

Pro-Palestinian encampment at CSULA linked to vandalism, anti-semitic graffiti

By late afternoon much of the campus beyond the SSB appeared empty as AIR7 HD flew overhead. A campus spokesperson confirmed that less than a dozen school employees were still in the SSB as of Wednesday evening but would not confirm if Eanes was still among them.

“I can confirm that there are still a small number of administrators in the building,” campus spokesperson Erik Hollins said. “We are working through options to bring this fluid situation to the best resolution possible.”

A group of protesters, many of them covering their faces, were stationed in front of the building’s entrance. There was pro-Palestinian graffiti covering many windows on the ground floor and some on upper floors that was apparently painted from the inside.

There did not appear to be many campus police, or any officers from outside agencies, in the area. LAPD told Eyewitness News they have not been asked to get involved.

The school referred to the group as “unauthorized protest activity.”

Some protesters were bringing in food, supplies – even diapers – to the building, signs they were prepared to stay for some time.