U.S. abortion rates fell just 2% after wave of state bans, CDC report shows
Despite the wave of state abortion bans that went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, the number of abortions in the U.S. fell by just 2% that year, according to the Centers for Disease’s first major report. Control and Prevention (CDC) to survey abortion supply in the post-Roe United States.
The findings in the report, released Wednesday, echo other research that has found abortion rates in the U.S. have risen surprisingly in the years since Roe’s death. In 2023, there were more than 1 million abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortions and restrictions on the procedure — the highest number in more than a decade.
“It really speaks to a bifurcation of access,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. “On the one hand, you have a lot of states where abortion has become incredibly difficult to access – states with total bans, states with six-week bans. Access has become much more difficult for people living in those states. And on the other hand, you have states with more protective laws, where many of the things people have done to mitigate the effects of bans have also increased access for residents of those states.
The CDC report found that U.S. providers performed more than 613,000 abortions in 2022, only a slight decrease from the nearly 626,000 abortions performed in 2021. Other figures on abortion supply also remained comparable to previous years. As in the Roe era, the vast majority of abortions occurred during or before nine weeks of pregnancy, according to the CDC. Just over 6% of abortions occurred 14 to 20 weeks into pregnancy, and about 1% occurred during or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. Women in their twenties made up the largest share of abortion patients. Nearly 60% of abortion patients had also given birth before.
However, the CDC report arrives with some asterisks. The data is not comprehensive, as four states — California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey — do not provide the agency with data on abortions performed in their jurisdictions. (The Guttmacher Institute study does include these states.) Some states also do not provide the CDC with demographic data about their abortion patients.
Also the CDC report does not include data on abortions performed outside the U.S. health care system. Previous research has found that in the six months after Roe fell, roughly 26,000 more Americans used pills to induce their own abortion at home than would have happened if Roe had not collapsed. (Medical experts generally agree that it is safe to self-manage your own abortion by using pills early in pregnancy.)
The gaps in the CDC data have infuriated some abortion opponents. Project 2025, the infamous playbook of conservative policy, suggests that states lose federal funding if they do not provide the CDC with data on “exactly how many abortions occur within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the state of residence of the mother, and by what method”. It also suggests that the CDC collect data on miscarriages, stillbirths and “treatments that occasionally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy).”
The increased availability of abortion pills almost certainly helps explain why numbers haven’t dropped. Eight states have passed “shield laws” that legally protect providers who use telemedicine to send abortion pills to people living in states that ban abortions. Between April and June 2024, shield laws allowed providers to offer an average of 7,700 abortions via telehealth each month to people in states with total or six-week bans. This is evident from data from #WeCounta research project of the Society of Family Planning.
Despite the national image, the number of abortions performed in several states that enacted near-total abortion bans after Roe fell fell dramatically, the CDC found. The number of abortions performed in Alabama, which banned almost all abortions in mid-2022, fell by more than half between 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, states that have become abortion havens have started performing many more abortions. Kansas, which borders several anti-abortion states, performed nearly 5,000 more abortions in 2022 than in 2021 — indicating that women in states with abortion bans are traveling for the procedure.
“We estimate that approximately 168,000 people traveled across state lines to access abortion care in 2023, which is more than double the number of people who traveled in 2019 or 2020,” Maddow-Zimet said. “It speaks to the way people go to great lengths – often with strong support from many other organizations – to access abortion care when they need it.”
Organizations such as abortion funds have long helped abortion patients pay their travel expenses. However, as outrage over Roe’s death has died down, many of those funds have begun to do so run out of money – which in turn could lead to a decline in abortion supply overall.
“We have a system right now that is really dependent on people donating large amounts of money, on people working overtime – both service providers and support organizations – to give people access,” Maddow-Zimet said. “Whether that’s something that can be sustained in the long term, I think is a big question.”