(The Washignton Stand) A new report from the Guttmacher Institute, a longtime advocate for legally unlimited abortion, estimates that total U.S. abortions increased in 2024. The report covers the more than two-thirds of states that have not revived or enacted pro-life laws in the wake of the June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Altogether, using a combination of survey samples of abortion facilities and historical methods, Guttmacher concluded that some 1,038,100 abortions took place in 2024, a little less than 1% more than occurred in 2023.
Scholar and statistician Michael New has responded to the data and noted that, given its methodology of sampling and historical estimation, it should be greeted with some skepticism. It would be better reported, as the details show, as a range rather than a concrete number in which there is great confidence. Over the decades, Guttmacher has relied on a triennial system of securing data directly from as many of the nation’s abortion facilities as it could reach. These reports are more accurate and detailed than what Guttmacher calls its Monthly Abortion Provision Study (MAPS). There is value in getting data much more rapidly than the triennial scheme allowed, but New’s caution is well taken. The core problem remains with the U.S. system of data collection on abortion, which relies on voluntary reporting at the national level and a patchwork of state policies under which major states with ultra-permissive policies do not collect and report their data in any public forum.
Still, there is enough information in the Guttmacher report to spur sober reflection. First, it’s clear that the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade did not result in a major reduction in the incidence of abortion in the United States. Only a handful of countries in the world have a collection of regional/provincial/state governments, and likewise only a handful of countries have abortion policies as permissive as the United States.
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Second, the changing landscape of abortion provision, which is shifting from an in-clinic experience to at-home measures, has driven increases in reported abortions that began well before the Dobbs ruling. Total abortions have been increasing in the United States ever since its lowest tally in 2017. Perhaps the biggest factor driving change has been the relaxation and non-enforcement of limits with respect to the distribution of abortion drugs, which have migrated from a wide variety of regulations to ensure physician supervision to today’s system of mail-order abortion without significant tracking of physical and emotional impacts on women.
Tweet This: The changing landscape of abortion, shifting from in-clinic to at-home, has driven increases in reported abortions that began before Dobbs.
Changes in state policy continue to play a key role as well. The Guttmacher MAPS report notes that six states led the way with significant increases in abortion incidence in 2024: Wisconsin, Arizona, California, Kansas, Ohio, and Virginia. California has gone out of its way to make itself an abortion destination, while other states have seen liberalizing trends through legislative enactment, ballot initiative, or judicial decree. Abortions in Wisconsin, for example, increased from 1,300 in 2023 when a pro-life law was in effect to 6,100 in 2024 after a Dane County Circuit Court held that an 1849 Wisconsin law prohibiting abortion was limited to assaults by third parties and did not apply to a woman consenting to the procedure. Rhode Island offers another example. Abortions increased in the Ocean State by 20% in 2024 after the state decided to publicly fund them.
Meanwhile, several states that have revived or enacted protections for the unborn saw their in-state abortion rates and numbers decline. Guttmacher focuses on South Carolina and Florida, each of which has enacted a law limiting abortion early in pregnancy. For 2024, abortions declined by 12,100 in Florida where a six-week “heartbeat” bill was passed and then ratified by popular vote under the leadership of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. In South Carolina, abortions declined by 3,500 after the state’s six-week heartbeat law was upheld by the state supreme court in August 2023, again spearheaded by a governor, Henry McMaster (R). How many abortions these laws ultimately averted is difficult to assess given the number of abortions taking place in liberal jurisdictions on out-of-state residents and the willingness of abortion suppliers to ship drugs across state lines in defiance of the receiving states’ pro-life laws.
The number of abortions carried out on women and girls from out of state is substantial — an estimated 155,000 in 2024, which would constitute roughly 15% of total U.S. abortions. This number is down slightly from 2023. To give a sense of its scope, a full 71% of abortions in Kansas are carried out on non-residents. The percentage is 69% in New Mexico, 39% in Illinois, and 36% in North Carolina. In terms of abortions arranged online and carried out in pro-life states using state laws in an attempt to conceal or protect the supplier, a separate study by the Society for Family Planning (SFP) tallied 34,500 abortions carried out this way in the first half of 2024 alone.
Clearly, understanding and assessing changes like these, which are rapid and historically unprecedented, is a matter of vital public interest. Abortion policy has been plagued for decades by misreporting and underreporting. Innate problems like the disjunction between where abortions occur and where injured mothers are treated, often not the same medical site, have always been present and are now aggravated by the advent of abortion drugs taken at home and often at great distance from medical aid. National abortion reporting, as noted above, misses hundreds of thousands of abortions per year and collects limited data. Some states’ reporting practices are deteriorating even as others are not collected in the first place (e.g., California, Maryland, New Hampshire). In New Jersey, only hospitals and certified ambulatory surgical centers are required to report abortions to state health officials, leaving researchers to rely on estimates rather than hard data.
Proposals to strengthen abortion reporting via making data collection mandatory have not made much headway, but in their absence, the best source of data will remain estimates created by groups that advocate for legal abortion. Abortion is a practice that, like many other issues fraught with public policy and social concerns, tends to draw the interest of analysts who are motivated by ethical considerations. Researchers from the Guttmacher Institute to ANSIRH to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, and more besides, take a view on their subject matter and debate among themselves about their methods and findings. This is as it should be. This is also why on such a critical issue, public bodies without institutional stances should be tasked with and fully funded to identify and gather information from the appropriate sources. This is especially vital in our federal system, where state health bodies are charged with gathering data and no national health system exists to provide a single source of basic information. International studies illuminate many questions better than U.S. bodies, but the American way of handling large datasets can be dramatically improved.
The Norman-Ernst Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act, introduced in January, would serve this goal by making certain federal family planning funding for the states contingent on their timely filing of abortion data with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As a press release accompanying the introduction of the bill stated, “The American taxpayer continues to fund family planning programs despite having little understanding of how effective those programs are at reducing the number of abortions throughout the country. If all states were to submit accurate abortion data to the CDC, lawmakers would be better informed on family planning policy decisions and Medicaid funding for those programs could be more suitably allocated.” The bill (S.178/H.R. 627) identifies 10 areas where data should be supplied to the CDC, a list that should continue to be refined and developed as new issues emerge in this area of public policy.
In the meantime, the well-being of children in the womb and the health of mothers are being compromised daily by the decreasing quality and comprehensiveness of data collection and by politically motivated attacks on science and statistical research. Ironically, the more controversial a subject is intrinsically, the more likely it is to spur advocates of one stripe or another to scorn and even censor studies and findings with which they take issue.
Whether the topic is COVID, climate change, nutrition, or abortion, issues on which the data and the debates should be free flowing, the more some partisans strain to suppress alternative views. Receiving the Robert Zimmer Medal from the American Academy of Science & Letters last October, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya summed up the situation well, saying, “During pandemics, the public depends on experts to share their expertise openly without fear or favor and to speak their minds openly about their scientific and policy evaluations.” The same should hold true for what is, on a worldwide scale, a pandemic of disrespect for the most vulnerable human lives.
Editor's note: Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy. He served on the board for Heartbeat International which manages Pregnancy Help News. This article was published by The Washington Stand and is reprinted with permission.
