The number of abortions in the United States increased in the year before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, according to figures released in a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
A total of 622,108 abortions were reported to the CDC across 46 states in 2021, up from about 592,939 in 2020, the health agency said on Nov. 15 in an annual report. That’s about a 5 percent increase.
Figures show that the 2021 total is still 8 percent lower than the total number that was reported in 2012.
“From 2012 to 2021, abortion rates decreased among all age groups, except women aged 30–34 years,” the CDC stated.
The report found that there were significant racial disparities in the figures. Black women accounted for 41.5 percent of abortions, while white women had 30.2 percent, and Hispanic women 21.8 percent, the CDC said
According to the CDC, white women had the lowest abortion rate, at 6.4 abortions per 1,000 women, while black women had the highest rate, at 28.6 abortions per 1,000 women.
A vast majority of women who received an abortion weren’t married, the figures show.
“For 2021, among the 37 areas that reported by marital status, 12.7 percent of women who obtained an abortion were married, and 87.3 percent were unmarried,” the CDC report said. “The abortion ratio was 41 abortions per 1,000 live births for married women, and 404 abortions per 1,000 live births for unmarried women.”
The report found that most abortions in 2021 were carried out with medication, by using mifepristone and misoprostol; women in their 20s accounted for more than half of the abortions at 57 percent.
Multiple factors—such as access to services, contraception, availability of abortion providers, and legal restrictions on abortion providers and clinics—affect the rate of abortion, according to the CDC report.
It found that adolescents under the age of 15 and women aged 40 and older had the lowest abortion percentages, at 0.2 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively. The authors said that the percentage changes might suggest there is a continuing decrease in U.S. adolescent pregnancies.
“From 2012 to 2021, national birth data indicate that the birth rate for adolescents aged 15–19 years decreased 53 percent, and the data in this report indicate that the abortion rate for the same age group decreased 41 percent,” the CDC report said. “These findings highlight that decreases in adolescent births in the United States have been accompanied by large decreases in adolescent abortions.”
The data were collected by the CDC before the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022, which effectively returned the power to legislate on the issue back to the states. Since then, at least 15 states have banned abortion outright, and many others prohibit it after a certain length of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research organization.
Notably, California, Maryland, and New Hampshire don’t report abortion data to the CDC. The report noted that in some other states, reporting is incomplete.
Births Increase in Other States
A recent analysis, meanwhile, found that states that had bans on abortions after the Supreme Court’s decision last year had an average fertility rate that was 2.3 percent higher than states without similar restrictions.“Our primary analysis indicates that in the first six months of 2023, births rose by an average of 2.3 percent in states enforcing total abortion bans compared to a control group of states where abortion rights remained protected, amounting to approximately 32,000 additional annual births resulting from abortion bans,” a report from the Institute of Labor Economics read.
The group said that its finding is based on provisional data from the CDC for the first six months of 2023.
Pro-life groups suggested they were pleased with the recent finding. Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, told The New York Times that with the finding, “it’s a triumph that pro-life policies result in lives saved.”
In 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that said the 1973 ruling was “egregiously wrong from the start.”
“Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division,” he wrote.
He was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kegan dissented.
