(Oregon Right to Life) — The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute this week released its annual report on nationwide abortions, indicating that the number of abortions performed in 2024 was essentially the same as those performed in 2023. However, other studies suggest that statewide pro-life laws have been responsible for saving thousands of unborn lives.
In a new full-year estimate from its New Monthly Abortion Provision Study, the Guttmacher Institute on Tuesday reported relative “stability” in the abortion rate nationwide. Over a million abortions were reportedly performed last year.
The annual report estimates that 1,038,100 abortions were performed in states that allow legal abortion in 2024, up less than 1% from the 1,033,740 performed in 2023. The data, if accurate, show that abortion rates increased in states with more liberal abortion laws while they decreased in states like Florida that enacted laws to protect the unborn.
Oregon Right to Life has previously reported on the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) numbers from 2023, which indicated a 16.2% increase in abortions statewide, including a 60% increase in women traveling to Oregon for abortions and more than two and a half times the number of late-term abortions compared to the prior year. Oregon is one of the most radical states in the nation on the issue of abortion, allowing abortions up to the moment of birth for any reason.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, however, the overall proportion of women traveling to other states for abortions across the country decreased in 2024 from 16% to 15%.
Time Magazine reported “[i]t’s not yet clear why travel for abortion declined slightly,” though Isaac Maddow-Zimet, data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute and the project lead for the study, suggested “that more patients in states with near-total abortion bans may be receiving abortion pills in the mail via telehealth rather than having to travel across state lines,” according to the report.
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Online “telehealth” prescription of abortion pills has quickly become the go-to method for abortion amid the loosening of FDA regulations surrounding chemical abortions, the closures of brick-and-mortar abortion facilities, and the enactment of pro-life laws in many U.S. states.
Chemical abortions, which function by starving the unborn to death and then triggering contractions in the mother to expel the deceased fetus, accounted for 63% of abortions in 2023. That increase comes in spite of the fact that abortion pills present increased risks to women, with the FDA estimating that roughly 85% of women who take the two-drug abortion pill regimen report at least one adverse reaction. A 2009 study from Finland found that chemical abortions were associated with an adverse reaction rate four times that of surgical abortions, including an increased risk of hemorrhage and incomplete abortion. In 2022, two Georgia women died after taking the abortion pill when they suffered incomplete abortions (a known risk) and contracted sepsis.
Meanwhile, it’s not clear how correct the Guttmacher Institute’s estimates are.
In a press statement shared with Oregon Right to Life, National Right to Life Director of Education and Research Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D. cast some doubt on the accuracy of the numbers, pointing to the research methods utilized by the Guttmacher Institute.
“This isn’t the old Guttmacher report that surveys every clinic and tracks down every abortionist,” O’Bannon said. “Guttmacher is still relying a bit too heavily on abortionists who were some of their most reliable sources before Dobbs and giving too much credit to abortion pill sales by ‘virtual’ and online pill promoters.”
Still, O’Bannon said the numbers reported suggest that abortion is at least not increasing overall.
“[T]hat they would report a figure similar to last year’s probably says that we’re not seeing a ‘growing market,’ that abortionists are not doing a lot more abortions, whatever the actual number of abortions really is,” he said. “Other studies do show that lives are being saved in states with pro-life protections, regardless of what Guttmacher is reporting.”
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Earlier this year, Charlotte Lozier Institute Senior Associate Scholar Michael J. New, P.h.D., highlighted a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that estimated that pro-life laws that protect the unborn at every stage of pregnancy and those that protect babies with a detectable heartbeat were responsible for saving roughly 22,000 lives.
“It is heartening to see an analytically rigorous study demonstrate the lifesaving effects of pro-life laws,” New wrote for National Review, adding that the study likely actually “understates the impact of some recent pro-life policy changes” by failing to consider “other gestational age limits,” “the impact of certain pro-life laws, such as those in Ohio and South Carolina, that were in effect for a limited period,” as well as “litigation in states where abortion remained technically legal” that could still “have had an impact, as some facilities might have been reluctant to perform abortions.”
New also pointed to an Institute of Labor Economics study that suggested even bigger numbers, finding “approximately 32,000 additional annual births resulting from abortion bans” in just the first half of 2023.
Overall, New suggested pro-life advocates should feel encouraged by the impact of laws protecting the unborn.
“A growing body of research is showing that recently enacted pro-life laws are, in fact, saving thousands of lives,” he said.
