According to the report, the number of abortions in the United States has increased, reversing what was a 30-year decline. New report..
The rise began in 2017, with one-fifth of pregnancies, or 20.6%, ending in 2020, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute, a research institute that supports the right to abortion. In 2017, 18.4% of pregnancies ended with an abortion.
The Institute, which contacts all known abortion providers in the country and collects data, reported that the number of abortions increased from 862,320 in 2017 to 930,160 in 2020. It increased by 10% in the Midwest, 8% in the South, and 2% in the Northeast.
New data was released when the Supreme Court was preparing to make a ruling that could effectively upset the standards of the Roe v. Wade case, which has legalized abortion in the United States for nearly 50 years. If the court’s final ruling is similar to the draft opinion leaked last month, about half of the states are expected to promptly ban or significantly limit abortion, while other states do not have access to patients from states where abortion is not available. Preparing to expand.
Overall, the new report shows that abortion rates rose to 14.4 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2020, and abortion per 1,000 women of that age group increased by 7% in 2017.
Read more about the US abortion debate
During this period, the number of births nationwide fell by 6%, according to the report. This means that “fewer people are pregnant and a high percentage of pregnant people choose to have an abortion.”
The report, which found that the number and proportion of abortions increased in 33 states and the District of Columbia, said “there was no clear pattern” to explain the trajectory of each state.It suggested several reasons for the national increase, including the tendency to directly affect the low-income earners, the population most likely to seek abortion in recent years: some states are Medicaid for the abortion. Expanded scope, and Funds have expanded to provide financial support to patients seeking abortion.
Another factor may have been the Trump administration’s policy to prevent patients from mentioning abortion options in a program that received federal family planning funding, known as the Title X Fund. With that rule, planned parent-child relationships and some state governments may reduce access to other family planning services, including contraception for low-income earners, leading to more unintended pregnancies in Title X. The Guttmacher report said it refused to accept the funding. The Biden administration then withdrew its policies during the Trump era.
The increase in abortion occurred when many conservative states imposed new restrictions on procedures. However, according to the report, between 2017 and 2020, 25 states set 168 abortion limits, some of which were suspended by legal opposition and many by states that already had significant limits. As it was enacted, the new law may not have been able to prevent further abortions.
At the same time, other states have enacted 75 provisions to protect or expand access to abortion. This includes requesting insurance to cover abortion and enabling nurse practitioners, physician midwives and certified nurse midwives to provide abortion services.
Leslie Reagan, a historian of American medicine and public health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said:
The data included most of the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. During that time, access to abortion was suspended in some states due to both ban attempts and restrictions on outbreaks and face-to-face health care, while some states maintained access to abortion, according to the report. did. In addition, for some parts of 2020, a judge’s decision allowed patients to have an abortion drug, which accounts for more than half of the country’s abortion. This is a permanent practice of the Food and Drug Administration in December 2021.
Dr. Reagan, who wrote the book “When Abortion was a Crime,” said he believed that “serious unemployment and food insecurity following abortion” during the pandemic also contributed to the increase in abortion. “Many people knew they couldn’t feed themselves or their existing families and couldn’t feed their children.”
Roe v. Wade
What is the Roe v. Wade case? The Roe v. Wade case is a groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion across the United States. The 7-2 decision was announced on January 22, 1973. Judge Harry A. Blackman, a modest Republican in the Midwest and an advocate of the right to abortion, wrote the majority opinion.
Susan B. Anthony ProLife America President Marjorie Dannenfelser has issued a statement condemning the increase in abortion. “The pro-life movement needs to continue to educate fellow Americans, and both state and federal-level pro-life lawmakers must be as ambitious as possible in building consensus,” she said. I did.
According to a news release from her group, the new report states that “abortion policies have expanded in recent years, such as California, Illinois and New York, and abortion has increased significantly in states where there are virtually no restrictions on abortion until birth.” … apparently …
In fact, the rate of increase in abortion numbers in these states was lower than in conservative states such as Mississippi, where abortion numbers increased by 40% between 2017 and 2020, and Oklahoma, where abortion numbers increased by 103%. At that time.
Mississippi’s growth is remarkable. This is because it is a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, which is currently in court in the Supreme Court. Guttmacher reports that Mississippi residents have sought abortion in neighboring states, but these states have enacted regulations to close clinics, causing more patients to have one abortion clinic in Mississippi. went to.
Oklahoma has just passed the strictest abortion ban in the United States, but abortion may have increased between 2017 and 2020 as many patients from Texas with many restrictions visited it. Still, new reports show that the number of abortions also increased in Texas during those years — 5 percent, the same percentage increase as in New York.
Of the 17 provinces, where numbers and proportions declined, Missouri saw the largest decline. Missouri had 4,710 abortions in 2017 and 170 in 2020. During that time, the rate of abortion increased by 25 percent.
The few states experienced in each region of the country, including five of the nine northeastern states, reflect the complex impact of deciding who seeks and where to have an abortion.
