Our finding that rural women travel further for care is consistent with previous research in rural women’s health. Rural women are known to experience poorer health outcomes and have less access to health care than urban women . However, the county level findings demonstrate that the abortion rate does not differ by the percent of women living in rural areas. That is, rural women have similar rates of publicly funded abortion as urban women and thus need comparable access to abortion care. This finding conflicts with the earliest study on this topic that suggested that rural women access abortion at lower rates than urban women, and also runs counter to the hypothesis that social and cultural factors cause significant differences in abortion utilization by rural and urban women . The distribution of facilities does not reflect this similar utilization, however.