Last year, two reports – one from the government, the other from a private research institute connected to the abortion industry – confirmed that there has been a significant drop in the number of abortions performed in the United States, to the point where the most recent annual total is just over one million.
Considering how there were 1.6 million abortions a year in 1990, and even 1.2 million as recently as 2008, this is a significant improvement, more than a half a million fewer than there were just 25 years ago.
Still too many by any counting, and the loss of every single child a tragedy, but evidence that real progress has been made.
There are many claiming credit for the drop, and there are probably many contributing factors, but it is important to note that a few of the popular explanations don’t really match the data.
In light of the economic downturn that started in late 2008, some have speculated that economics were involved, but this would actually be a reverse of the conventional wisdom, which assumes that hard economic times lead to more, not fewer abortions.
Birthrates dropped 11% from 2008 to 2011, the same time abortions dropped 13%, leading some to see a correlation, but this appears to be just the back side of a birthrate bubble that occurred during the mid 2000s, during which there was no corresponding expected abortion increase.
Regular contraceptive use increased only slightly during this time frame, leading some to speculate that women switching to longer acting, more effective methods may have been the cause. Time frames don’t match, though, unless one supposes that nearly everyone switched to the longer acting methods in 2009.
These matters are dealt with in more detail in The State of Abortion report.
One thing these reports do tell us, however, is that there were an unusual number of large abortion clinics closing during this latest study period. While the number and workload of smaller offices and clinics was about the same in 2008 as in 2011, the number clinics performing a thousand or more abortions a year dropped by 47.
Though perhaps that doesn’t sound like much, the number of abortions performed by those large clinics fell by 154,440 – virtually the entire amount of the annual decline from 2008 to 2011.
We don’t know why these clinics went out of business, but these were the “high volume, high profit” clinics like those run by abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Thanks to the suspension of his license in 2010 and his eventual conviction for murdering babies born alive at his clinic in 2013, he was one of the “providers” that should have been in the 2008 data but would have been missing from that of 2011.
Opponents of pro-life legislation and education have tried to claim that there is no evidence that these work, but the numbers seem to say otherwise. They look just to legislation passed in certain states during the 2009 to 2001 time frame and claim there was little difference between states that did pass pro-life legislation and those that didn’t.
This ignores the long term cumulative effect of state and federal legislation that has been passed over the past 30 years and the way that the debate in one state or one branch of Congress affects the discussion in another.
It is not an effect that our opponents ignore in the political context. Consider how they marshaled media and activists from all over the country in 2013 to challenge H.B. 2 in Texas in 2013
What is clearly the case is that the more information women have about abortion and alternatives, the more they choose life.
There is, of course, one place where abortions have remained steady despite the nationwide drop – Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood has closed clinics, merged affiliates, and let staff go, of course, but their abortion totals have remained relatively stable during this nationwide decline, right at about 330,000 a year.
They have done it turning legislative and PR challenges to Planned Parenthood’s abortion empire into fundraising fodder, raising money to build giant new shiny megacenters that can do the sort of “high volume, high profit” abortions of bigtime operators like Gosnell.
Dozens of these megacenters have been built over the last several years, helping Planned Parenthood maintain and expand its taxpayer subsidized empire, now responsible for nearly one out of every three abortions done in the U.S.
This explains why Planned Parenthood spends millions on elections, trying to keep the funding spigot wide open, and why Planned Parenthood has been aggressively pushing ObamaCare as a whole new revenue stream.
Planned Parenthood does not shrink from its abortion performance or advocacy. In fact, it loudly proclaims that it “fought abortion stigma in popular culture.”
What apparently is a stigma for Planned Parenthood is mention of the unborn child, who loses his or her life in each of Planned Parenthood’s 327,653 surgical and chemical “procedures.”
Though Planned Parenthood is increasingly pushing chemical abortifacients like the dangerous RU-486, which enables them to add abortion to the offerings of smaller, more lightly staffed clinics, or even smaller branch offices via webcam, few people realize that over a hundred Planned Parenthood clinics offer second trimester abortions, with more than a dozen offering abortions at 20 weeks or more.
Though we see the drop in abortions as good news, it obviously serves as a call to retrench in some quarters.
With 1.06 million abortions still being performed each year in the U.S., we obviously have a long way yet to go. Abortion rates to minorities are still high. A lot of aborting women are single moms and nearly half of abortions are repeat abortions. Women are still dying from abortions and few people know it.
We know that there is a better way and that women are looking for it.
Given information, given time to think, given support and realistic alternatives, millions of women have shown that they’d rather let their babies live. National Right to Life has been working to make that possible, and it’s clearly paying off.