A version of this story appeared in the Higher Ground newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Higher Ground delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday.
New figures show that the number of abortions increased during the first six months of 2023, compared to the same period in 2020, when the procedure was legal throughout the country.
The numbers cast doubt on the effectiveness of states’ restrictions on abortion since the Supreme Court ended a national right to the procedure in June 2022.
The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute estimated that 511,000 abortions occurred in 32 states where the procedure was legal from January through June, compared to about 465,000 procedures during the same period in 2020 when abortion was legal across the entire country.
The roughly 10% increase included surgical procedures and chemical abortion pills dispensed in those states, even as 14 others restricted abortions, often in neighboring jurisdictions.
Several analysts attributed the increase to a combination of women crossing state lines to terminate pregnancies and acquiring abortion pills in other states.
“It’s a signal that it’s harder to enforce bans than people in the pro-life movement hope,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a leading historian of the legal abortion debate, told The Washington Times. “Focusing on banning pills and out-of-state travel will only make Americans ignore the laws, just like they did with alcohol during Prohibition.”
Abortions rose most sharply in blue states bordering states that imposed restrictions after the Supreme Court returned jurisdiction to them in 2022, Guttmacher noted.
For example, Guttmacher estimated that Illinois had 18,300 more abortions this year while neighboring Missouri, Wisconsin and Kentucky had “few or no abortions” due to state-imposed bans.
Pro-life advocates acknowledged the increase in abortion but stressed that state restrictions worked where officials enforced them.
“Overall, plenty of data collected since the [Supreme Court] decision show that thousands of lives have been saved by strong state-level, pro-life laws,” said Michael New, an assistant professor of social research at the Catholic University of America and scholar at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. “As such, pro-lifers would do well to stay the course.”
Other states with abortion-restricting neighbors that saw jumps in the number of procedures included Colorado, Kansas and South Carolina.
Abortions dropped slightly in Arizona, Georgia and Indiana as officials moved toward restrictions. In Indiana, where abortions dropped by 100 during the first six months of this year, a ban on nearly all procedures took effect last month.
The Guttmacher findings clash with earlier reports that suggest abortions started falling after the high court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In June, the Society of Family Planning estimated 25,640 fewer abortions nationwide between July 2022 and March 2023 than during the three months (March to May) before the ruling. The pro-choice group based its report on a growing database it has assembled of abortion providers nationwide.
Guttmacher said the confidence level for its state estimates, based on survey samples of providers, varied widely because of likely underreporting of abortions.
“Measuring the number of abortions that occur in the United States has always required some amount of estimation — and thus uncertainty — because of a number of complicating factors (including abortion stigma and incomplete reporting), and these challenges have only increased post-Dobbs,” Guttmacher said in a summary of findings.
According to UC Davis’ Ms. Ziegler, the conflicting reports confirm it is getting harder to estimate abortion numbers.
“I’m going to guess the numbers are even higher because, whenever something gets criminalized, it goes underground and some of it won’t get reported,” Ms. Ziegler said.
Analysts on both sides of the issue have pointed to Texas as a leading indicator of trends in and around abortion-restricting states.
The Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans most abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, became law in September 2021 after the Supreme Court upheld it. That came eight months before the Dobbs ruling allowed other states to restrict abortions.
The number of babies born in Texas between March and July 2022 (157,856) exceeded the previous three-year average by more than 5,000, according to data from the Texas Department of State Health Services that Catholic University’s Mr. New analyzed in a November 2022 report for Charlotte Lozier.
Between September 2021 and January 2022, the number of abortions in Texas dropped by 10,000, he found.
Since 2021, Texas has passed additional laws protecting life from conception and banning mail-order abortion drugs but has not restricted out-of-state travel.
In its report last week, Guttmacher did not offer a count for Texas but estimated that nearby New Mexico had 6,480 more abortions between January and June than in 2020.
That came as mixed news to Mary Elizabeth Castle, director of government relations at pro-life Texas Values, a conservative legal and legislative advocacy group based in Austin.
“It’s disheartening to see a surge in states like New Mexico a year after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, but it’s proof that pro-life laws in Texas are effective at stopping abortions,” Ms. Castle told The Times. “These laws are deterrents to abortion and are opening people’s minds to alternatives like adoption and pregnancy resource centers.”
She noted that while the Texas Heartbeat Act allows activists to enforce it by suing abortion providers directly, several district attorneys have publicly refused to enforce other laws banning mail-order pills and further restricting abortion access.
“We have to have our district attorneys uphold our pro-life laws for them to work,“ Ms. Castle said.
Activists are working to persuade women about alternatives to abortion even as they push for tighter restrictions, said Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International, an association supporting pro-life crisis pregnancy centers.
“Pro-life states have incorporated new ways to serve women and families to help them overcome challenges,” Mr. Godsey, a former pregnancy center volunteer, told The Times. “The reality is we have never been able to calculate the number of abortions accurately due to differing reporting laws and the growth in dangerous mail-order abortions from overseas.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.