Legal Abortions Fell Around 6 Percent in Two Months After End of Roe v. Wade Decision, CDC Says
A federal study has found that abortion rates fell in 22 states a year after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).The researchers analyzed abortion data from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System, which includes data from nearly all of the states in the U.S. from 1966 through 2016.According to the data, the average decline in abortion rates from the year before Roe v. Wade was decided was 6 percent, but there were wide differences in the declines among states.From 1973 to 1976, the percentage of abortion cases dropped by 13 percent, dropping to an average of 7.2 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44.From 1977 to 2010, the cases dropped by an average of 4.5 percent with a median of 3.0 abortions per 1,000 women. But from 2011 to 2016, cases plunged by an average of only 0.1 percent a year, with a median of 2.2 abortions per 1,000 women.The study was published in JAMA. The Journal of the American Medical Association is published by the American Medical Association.The researchers found that rates declined most in the states that were later in the state’s history to legalize abortion and then restricted abortion after Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.Since 1973, the first state with a ban on abortion after the fetus begins to show major physical signs of life, there have been a total of 12 states that have passed Roe v. Wade-related abortion restrictions.The 12 states that instituted abortion restrictions after Roe v. Wade had an abortion rate that declined annually by an average of 5.3 percent, with a median of 5.0 abortions per 1,000 women. In contrast, the average decline in abortion rates in the 12 abortion-restricting states was only 2.6 percent a year, with a median of 1.8 abortions per 1,000 women.“From 1973 to 2004, the abortion rate from these [abortion-restricting] states was lower than from states that had legalized abortion prior to Roe [v. Wade],” the study found.“During this period, in six of the 12 states, overall abortion
