(CLI) Research, reporting, and record-keeping can be a funny thing. The federal government aims to tell us what the global climate will be like a decade from now, yet it struggles to tell us what happened regarding abortion in America three years ago.
We are not interested in taking a position here on the topic of climate change, but we do pay close attention to abortion statistics, and once again the news, slow in coming as it is, is uneven.
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The latest abortion surveillance (not our term) report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought welcome news that abortion rates in the United States continue to fall. But the report also underscored the chronic shortcomings of our national abortion reporting system.
U.S. abortion data is increasingly inadequate for the CDC’s stated goals of measuring unintended pregnancies and pregnancy outcomes and tracking changes in clinical practice.
The CDC itself admits that abortion data is incomplete, inconsistent, and insufficient for detailed analyses, and as the most recent report illustrates, the problem is only getting worse.
Tweet This: The CDC admits that abortion data is incomplete, inconsistent, and insufficient ... the problem is only getting worse
Editor's note: Chuck Donovan is the president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, where Tessa Longbons is a research associate. Longbons has authored CLI’s individual state abortion reports as well as the comprehensive report, “Abortion in the United States 2017: Preliminary Review and a Call for Review.” This introductory article was published by CLI. The full article was published at the Washington Examiner.
