People who have visited our website over the years may be familiar with a fact sheet which regularly gave a tally of the lives lost to abortion in American since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Last year we estimated there had been more than 65 million abortions over the last fifty years.
But we haven’t added to that total this year. And that particular fact sheet hasn’t been updated.
Let us explain why and tell you all about our two new fact sheets on abortion statistics.
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Counting abortion in the past
For decades, National Right to Life relied on data collected from two basic sources: the Guttmacher Institute, at one time a special research affiliate of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which published official government statistics.
The CDC relied on reports from state health departments and regularly published figures every year. Guttmacher conducted intensive surveys of all identified abortion “providers” and put these together in a report appearing every two or three years.
Numbers from Guttmacher were thought to be the most accurate because they surveyed providers directly and had numbers from every state. However, the CDC was still thought valuable, because it provided a standard format and allowed for yearly comparisons.
Dobbs altered the abortion landscape
The utility and accuracy of those reports changed dramatically in June of 2022 when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe.
Many states with “trigger laws” immediately started protecting unborn children and, over the coming months, several other states limited the conditions under which abortion might be allowed.
This brought about the closure of many clinics and prompted the abortion industry and abortion friendly states to promote (and sometimes fund) travel for pregnant women in pro-life states who were considering abortions.
Counts taken shortly before and after the court’s decision showed abortions dropped in a lot of these pro-life states right away, though some women still left and got abortion in neighboring states.
Additionally, due to safety rules watered down by the Biden administration, online mifepristone merchants began mailing abortion pills to the homes of many women even in states where their use was illegal.
Counting abortions becomes more difficult
All this made abortions harder to track and count. How do you get numbers or project caseloads for abortionists who quit or moved and changed addresses? What if they moved and then perhaps adopted a new business model, e.g., switching from private practice and joining a big megaclinic, operating out of a new mobile clinic, or only doing telemedicine?
Another complication. How do you count chemical abortions when hundreds or thousands of abortion pills are being ordered online or by phone and shipped in non-descript packages into the state?
Even if you know how many sales there have been, how do you determine how many women actually used the pills mailed secretly to their homes and “successfully” aborted or how many just bought and stored them in their medicine cabinets?”
Trying to count in new ways
It was actually a trade group, the Society of Family Planning, which first decided to try to get a sense of how things changed after Dobbs. It collected data from its membership in a ‘We Count” survey in the months just before and after the Supreme Court’s decision. Their numbers showed a drop, particularly in pro-life states, just after Dobbs, but then showed overall national abortion levels appearing to return to “normal” in 2023.
Not to be outdone by the new upstart, the Guttmacher Institute put its usual exhaustive multi-year count aside and tried something similar to what SFP did. Guttmacher began to conduct a monthly spot survey of its own, getting reports from some of its top “providers,” sampling some others, and projecting totals for the rest.
There was some variation between Guttmacher’s and SFP’s counts, but both appeared to show abortions returning to pre-Dobbs levels and then continuing to increase, driven by sponsored abortion travel and sales of chemical abortion.
Data show rising births
Reports of increasing abortions contradicted both anecdotal and statistical evidence showing thousands of additional births in states with new pro-life protections.
A research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in June of 2023 found laws passed in Texas in 2021 limiting abortion to early pregnancy resulted in 9,799 additional births, about 3% more than expected.
A 2024 study from the Journal of Public Economics found similar results in other states with new laws protecting unborn children. The authors concluded “states with abortion bans experienced an average increase in births of 2.3 percent relative to if no bans had been enforced.”
Unless there was a sudden and overall increase in pregnancy in those states – something no study or data shows – it simply cannot be the case that both abortions and births surged at the same time. Someone is clearly in error.
Nailing down abortion statistics
It is against this historical backdrop and in the midst of this conflicting data that NRLC had to determine what to do with our annual cumulative abortion count. We decided to split this into two different fact sheets, one dealing with the Roe era, the other addressing the circumstances after Dobbs.
The Legacy of Roe lists the official abortion numbers from Guttmacher and the CDC, like the old statistics fact sheet did, but specifically limits itself to the time when Roe was in force, from 1973 to mid 2022. Using that data and stopping at that point, NRLC has determined that Roe cost America more than 64 million lives.
On the front side of this factsheet, we take some time to lay out the events and the legislation that caused abortions to increase or decrease over those nearly fifty years where Roe held sway. On the reverse side we talk about some of social, economic, political and cultural impacts resulting from the loss of tens of millions of innocent lives.
After Dobbs reports on the new numbers published by the abortion industry since 2022. This factsheet explains how Guttmacher and SFP surveyed their memberships, projected figures for abortionists they couldn’t reach, attempted to track abortion travel, and used abortion pill sales figures to claim abortion increases across the board, even in pro-life states.
This fact sheet relates some of the problems with those projections (several of which we mentioned above) and offers competing data showing increased births in many of those pro-life states.
The final conclusion is that abortion travel is taking place, and abortion pills are being mailed to women in pro-life states, keeping the abortion industry busy. But we still have evidence that many women are responding to new pro-life legislation and to public and private assistance by staying home and giving birth to their babies.
Bottom Line
Roe cost this country tens of millions of innocent lives, leaving a painful legacy that will never fully heal. Even so, it would have been far worse if not for the efforts of pro-life Americans who offered practical alternatives and put up legislative barriers that eventually resulted in Roe’s overturn.
The abortion industry did not disappear with Dobbs. They prepared for this day, turning their clinic staff into travel agents, paying women to travel to neighboring states for abortions, often covered by private abortion funds.
They developed abortion pills and used Democrat presidents to get rid of regulations that had previously kept these from being prescribed by telemedicine and shipped to women’s homes, even in states where they were illegal.
Women did respond to state protections, however, leading to the births of thousands of new babies.
There is much that has been and can yet be done restore a culture of life to this country. With the law finally on our side, it seems we have seen some tangible progress in the ongoing fight to protect human life.
It’s going to be difficult to get solid numbers for the next few years, but we can already tell we’re having an impact.
LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee.
