The U.S. has seen a stark drop in the number of abortions occurring nationwide since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, a Daily Caller review of public data shows.
Abortion advocates have claimed abortion bans will only serve to make the procedure more dangerous, as women go to unsafe lengths to skirt bans. Opponents of pro-life laws also point out the number of abortions performed outside the medical system will remain unreported in national statistics and could be lethal to many women.
While exact numbers remain difficult to pin down — “back-alley” abortions are, by their very nature, unreported in most instances — multiple reports released since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision indicate that pro-life laws are accomplishing what they set out to do. (RELATED: Pro-Abortion Professor Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Notre Dame’s Campus Paper)
Between July 2022 and March 2023, there were 24,290 fewer abortions than in the nine months before Dobbs, according to Five Thirty Eight. As laws restricting abortion took effect in Republican-led states, many women crossed state lines to access the procedure. As a result, abortions in states with few restrictions increased by 69,285. Abortions in states that restricted abortion, however, still decreased by 93,575.
Planned Parenthood of Illinois announced in June that abortions at their clinics increased by 54 percent since Dobbs. The clinics also reported performing almost a quarter of their abortions on out-of-state patients, with women traveling to the clinics from 34 different states.
A strict abortion law that took effect in Texas in 2021 may have led to nearly 10,000 more births than expected in the last nine months of 2022, according to research published in the journal JAMA. https://t.co/7mIbOXflfc
— CNN (@CNN) July 6, 2023
In Texas, an abortion law that took effect in 2021 “led to nearly 10,000 more births than expected in the last nine months of 2022,” according to CNN’s analysis of a study. The study was significant in measuring births rather than abortion, eliminating the question of whether an abortion statistic took into account illegal or self-induced abortions.
“There were still a lot of people who were going further afield for abortion care or who were self-managing their abortion,” Suzanne Bell, co-author of the study, said. “But our results suggest that not everyone was able to overcome those barriers, and many were forced [to carry] an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy to term.”
In the six months after Dobbs, legal abortions decreased by six percent nationwide, the New York Times reports. While some women in conservative states may try to seek abortions out of state, the costs and logistics associated with the travel involved often made that an impossibility.
The ongoing fight over the legality of the abortion pill adds a layer of complexity to measuring abortion rates in America. An abortion pill can end an unborn child’s life into the 10th week of pregnancy.
The Supreme Court voted to temporarily preserve access to the abortion pill in April. The Court’s decision preserved access to the pill while the legal fight over the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of it continues; the case has been sent back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.