According to the Society of Family Planning, the abortion rate nationwide has dropped 3.3% since last year's Dobbs decision. Here are the states where the abortion rate went up and down the most:
Texas went from nearly 3,000 abortions per month to zero. Florida, where abortion bans remain mired in court, saw an increase because it's close to lots of Southern states that enacted strict abortion laws. States like California and New York saw fairly large increases in the number of abortions they provided, but their numbers weren't all that high on a percentage basis.
UPDATE: Note that these numbers do include most medication abortions using pills like mifepristone—but only if clinical assistance is involved (either in-person or online). Medication abortions aren't counted if they're done entirely outside the health care system. It's impossible to say if this affects the final figures either up or down.
I'm curious to see the outcome of the natural experiment of changes in the birth rate due to zero abortions. While one might assume on the surface that the birth rate would increase, instead, we might see greater proliferation of birth control pill usage.
What happens if Texas is successful in cutting off access to birth control pills? Will that finally lead to an outmigration?
I mean, people like having sex and don’t like being forced to birth children they don’t want and also don’t like being told “well you’re pregnant so we can’t treat you for X disease until you’re literally dying,” so imma gonna guess that these hardcore anti abortion states are going to eventually experience an exodus of women with the means to leave. (Assuming of course that Gilead doesn’t ban women from interstate travel by then.)
Doctors have been seeing an uptick in requests for vasectomies and tubal ligation procedures since the Dobbs decision. So an unintended consequence may end up being an overall less fertile population. And probably an increase in people needing artificial reproductive services when some of those people eventually decide to try for children anyway.
So it doesn't count back alley and covered up ones, either.
Was the birth rate 3% higher this year? Doubt it. Were pregnancies down 3%? Doubt it.
Great news!
Wasn't the abortion rate already low in many red states? They were using many strategies to reduce accessibility. More informative would be the absolute change in abortions per capita.
There are all sorts of caveats that should surround figures like this, starting with your almost throwaway "Medication abortions aren't counted if they're done entirely outside the health care system." My understanding of the statistics is that medication abortions constitute a majority of those before 10 weeks or so, and with the changes in the laws of the red states, a whole lot more of them will be done "entirely outside the health care system" than was the case before. My guess would be, in fact, all of them, at least till the point where assistance becomes absolutely necessary. And then, we get to the second caveat: namely, any of those women who can will go out of state to get the assistance they need, and others will rely on under the radar providers for help (as in the bad old days of back alley abortions)
Without proper controls, these numbers strike me as pretty meaningless.
I suspect that there are very few medication abortions done entirely outside the medical system. There ARE probably a significant number that are done entirely outside the official records of the medical system.
There weren't zero abortions in TX, get real. There were zero REPORTED because it is a crime now.