Abortions are on the rise again

The number of abortions in the United States has increased, reversing a 30-year decline, according to a new report.

The rise began in 2017 and, as of 2020, one in five pregnancies, or 20.6%, ends in abortion, according to the report by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports the right to abortion. In 2017, 18.4% of pregnancies ended in abortion.

The institute, which collects data by contacting every known US abortion service, said the number of abortions increased to 930,160 in 2020 from 862,320 in 2017. This number rose in all regions of the country: 12% in the West, 10% in the Midwest, 8% in the South and 2% in the Northeast.

Overall, the abortion rate increased in 2020 to 14.4 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 from 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women in 2017, an increase of 7%, according to the report.

The report states that during this period, births nationwide decreased by 6%.

This new data comes as the Supreme Court is expected to issue a judgment soon that could effectively overturn Roe v. Wade who made abortion legal in the United States nearly 50 years ago.

If that happens, about half of the states should quickly ban or severely restrict abortion, while other states are preparing to expand access to patients from states that make abortion impossible.

Abortion and family planning

The report suggests several reasons for the increase in the number of abortions, including trends that directly affect poor and low-income people, the population most likely to seek abortion in recent years. Some states have expanded Medicaid coverage for abortion, according to the report, and abortion funds that provide financial assistance to patients have grown in recent years.

Another factor may have been the Trump administration’s policy of preventing groups that received family planning funding from mentioning the abortion option to patients, which caused Planned Parenthood and several state governments to refuse this funding. This may have reduced access to other family planning services, including contraception, for low-income people, and led to more unintended pregnancies, according to the Guttmacher report. The Biden administration has since reversed the Trump-era policy.

Access to abortion protected despite restrictions and the pandemic

The surge in abortions came at a time when many conservative states were enacting restrictions. But the report says that while 25 states enacted 168 restrictions between 2017 and 2020, some were stopped by legal challenges and many were enacted by states that already had many restrictions, so the new laws may not have any effect. prevented many more abortions.

At the same time, other states have adopted 75 provisions aimed at protecting or expanding access to abortion.

These provisions included requiring insurance to cover abortion and allowing nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives to provide certain abortion services, according to the report.

The data included most of the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The report says that while access to abortion has been disrupted in some states during this period, both due to attempted bans and outbreaks and limits on in-person medical care, some states have maintained the access to abortion. Additionally, for part of 2020, a judge’s ruling allowed abortion pills, which account for more than half of nationwide abortions, to be mailed to patients — a practice that the Food and Drug Administration Administration made permanent in December 2021.

The report’s findings align with the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which found a slight increase in the number of abortions from 2018 to 2019, the last year for which the CDC had data. CDC data, which is collected from state health agencies, does not include information from California, Maryland and New Hampshire.

The full version of this text was published in the New York Times.