Tuesday marks the three-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which returned abortion law to the states.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade didn’t end the debate over abortion, nor did it completely satisfy abortion opponents — one anti-abortion activist this week called the decision “an unfolding victory.”
And one key piece of information remains absent in the public conversation: the actual number of abortions that take place in the U.S. every year.
Despite the proliferation of technology that collects data on everything from what we watch on TV to what we buy online, when it comes to abortion, reliable numbers dry up. As Pew Research has said, “An exact answer is hard to come by. The CDC and the Guttmacher Institute have each tried to measure this for around half a century, but they use different methods and publish different figures.”
Reporting to the federal government is voluntary, so the CDC’s most recent abortion surveillance report lacks data from California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey. The data is also more than two years old, covering abortions in 2022. And the emergence of the “self-managed abortion” — abortion drugs obtained via telehealth — has made abortions even more difficult to track.
More recent statistics are available from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that was once a part of Planned Parenthood and which supports abortion rights. (A fundraising page for the group features a photo of people holding signs that say “Abortion saves lives.”)
The incomplete data has been frustrating to pro-life groups such as the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which says that full and up-to-date reporting matters not only for public health guidance, but to accurately assess the state of abortion post-Dobbs.
“Abortion reporting provides key insight into how laws affect abortion numbers. However, no one except pro-abortion organizations like the Society of Family Planning and Guttmacher Institute has access to raw abortion totals reported by abortion centers and organizations themselves,” Mia Steupert, a research associate at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said in a statement provided to the Deseret News.
Steupert is the author of a paper released last month titled “How Many Abortions are Occurring in America Post-Dobbs?”
How has abortion changed after Dobbs?
After the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 24, 2022, some abortion-rights advocates predicted dire consequences for women’s health. For example, Human Rights Watch said in 2023 that ending Roe v. Wade would represent an “unprecedented human rights crisis” for pregnant women.
The language of crisis can still be seen in the recent conversation about a brain-dead pregnant woman in Georgia who remained on life support in order to give her fetus time to develop. (The baby was delivered last week.) Some critics called the case of Adriana Smith a dystopian outcome of Dobbs.
Abortion-rights supporters have also said that the deaths of women who used pills to facilitate an abortion, like Amber Nicole Thurman, who died after aborting twins with medication, are a direct outcome of the decision. Abortion opponents say that such deaths have occurred because medication abortions are risky.
In April, the Ethics & Public Policy Center released a report saying that serious adverse effects of medication abortions are being underreported by the Food and Drug Administration.
According to data from insurers, “10.93 percent of women — roughly one in 10 — experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion," the report said. “Combined with the 5.26 percent of women who undergo a second abortion attempt following the failure of the mifepristone abortion regimen and adjusting to avoid double-counting, we find that 13.51 percent of women — roughly one in seven — experience at least one serious adverse event or repeated abortion attempt within 45 days of first attempting a mifepristone abortion."
The Guttmacher Institute responded, challenging the EPPC’s methodology and conclusions, and saying the study was part of a “misinformation campaign.”
“Mifepristone is safer than commonly prescribed medications like penicillin and Viagra, and safer than childbirth,” wrote co-authors Rachel K. Jones of Guttmacher and Dr. Jamila Perritt of Physicians for Reproductive Health.
Abortion numbers in the U.S.
Anti-abortion activist Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, released a statement Monday calling the Dobbs decision “an unfolding victory that is empowering more legislators to be more aggressive in protecting the unborn, restraining courts from striking down pro-life laws and making conversations about abortion more difficult for abortion advocates because they can no longer hide behind the robes of the Supreme Court justices.”
He added, “The whole landscape of the courts has shifted as a result of Dobbs and the decision will continue to bear more fruit,” and he encouraged abortion opponents to “keep your eyes on the prize.”
The prize — the end of abortion — still seems elusive for the pro-life camp, despite victories they are marking this week, like the babies the group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America says have been born because of the Dobbs decision.
That’s because, despite the restrictions on abortion that 24 states adopted after the Dobbs ruling, the number of abortions in the U.S. has gone up, in large part because of telehealth.
Geoff Mulvihill, writing for The Associated Press, said the latest numbers from the Society of Family Planning showed there were about 1.1 million abortions in the U.S. last year. That amounts to about 95,000 abortions a month, “up from about 88,000 monthly in 2023 and 80,000 a month between April and December of 2022.”
“While the total number of abortions has risen gradually over those three years, the number has dropped to near zero in some states, while abortions using pills obtained through telehealth appointments have become more common in nearly all states.”
Abortions are also being enabled by networks that emerged after the Dobbs decision to help women in states with strict abortion laws get abortions in other states. Women who want abortions can apply to get funding and help with travel and child care, among other expenses.
Meanwhile, even as the effects of the Dobbs decision are still being debated, one mystery surrounding it remains unsolved: Who leaked the decision a month before it was officially released, an action that the justices called “an extraordinary betrayal of trust.”