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While the abortion industry has put out a couple of reports of its own, the latest report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) represents the first official count covering abortions since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe in June of 2022.

It is not perfect – it contains a lot of gaps and is too often short on analysis and explanations – but it is useful in that it does rely on hard data from state reports sent to the federal agency.

It shows us that there was some drop off in the number of abortions from 2021 to 2022, evidence of Dobbs’ impact after what appears to have been an upward trend from 2017.

Despite some women traveling to other states to have abortions, legal protections put in place by many states after the Supreme Court’s decision appear to have reduced the overall number of abortions performed in the country.

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Chemical abortions using drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol continue to be on the rise, making continued drops in the future challenging, particularly with abortion pills now being shipped through the mail.

A changing vector

For 2022, the CDC reported 613,383 abortions, about 12,500 less than it reported in its previous report for the year before (625,978 abortions for 2021).

Abortion rates and ratios for the CDC are both also down from 2021, indicating that the reduced incidence and preference among pregnant women is not merely some statistical artifact.

Both 2022 and 2021 numbers exclude abortions from a number of states responsible for large numbers of abortions: California, Maryland, New Hampshire and, as has been the case the last couple of years, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, the nation’s capital.

In the past, those missing states have been responsible for performing maybe hundreds of thousands of abortions a year, leading many to conclude the actual national annual number is somewhere between 900,000 and a million.

Nevertheless, there are two important relevant points to take from the CDC data: 1) that the numbers are down, that they reversed direction after increasing in the past several years; 2) that the drops coincided with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe with its Dobbs decision in the middle of 2022.

Though the CDC doesn’t report abortions by month and never directly mentions the court decision in its analysis, the relevance of these factors is backed up by a more detailed dissection of the data.

States go different directions

While we only know the year-to-year variations, one thing the CDC does report is the numbers of abortions recorded by each of the states and the number performed on out-of-state residents.

This enables us to see how large events, such as the implementation of pro-life laws or the state promotion or funding of abortion, can have an impact on a state’s actions from one year to the next.

The data from the CDC is quite revealing on this score.

There were a number of states that fought through court challenges and had to jump several legislative hurdles for their protective legislation to go into effect. CDC data demonstrates that these states, which early on attempted or instituted and maintained protections immediately after Dobbs, clearly showed a major drop off in 2022.

While some of these states already had low abortion rates, due to previous legislative actions, certain states saw enormous drops: Alabama saw abortions drop by nearly 42%, Arkansas more than 48%, Kentucky 42.5%, Louisiana nearly 39%, Mississippi 40%, and Tennessee 47%!

Once Oklahoma had its own protections in place, a drop of more than 70% was absolutely real, though a part of that was the sudden cessation of abortion travel from neighboring states. Texas had already greatly reduced its numbers in recent years owing to pre-Dobbs legislation but shrunk its numbers by an additional two-thirds in 2022!

Dobbs the most obvious explanation

Without monthly data, it is difficult to prove this conclusively from the numbers, but this likely represents not simply some gradual reduction in rates over the year, but the sudden shuttering of the abortion industry in these states after the court’s ruling in Dobbs.

So, before the end of June, when Dobbs was officially announced, abortion clinics were still open and operational in those states.  There is actually some indication that there was a short-term jump in abortions in the months leading up to that announcement, owing to a leak of the decision in early May.

But after Dobbs was announced and put into effect, many clinics in those states which had either full protections for the unborn or gestational limits ended up closing their doors, reducing abortions to near zero.

This would mean that the numbers reported by the CDC for these states more accurately reflect half year totals than just simple reductions. Subsequent official reports from these states may show only a handful of abortions for emergency or health conditions.

Some of these women went elsewhere or ordered abortion pills online. But the overall national drop is an indication that the court’s decision and these state laws clearly saved lives.

CDC does show increased state travel

When Dobbs allowed states to limit abortion within their borders, numbers of women traveled to neighboring states, often lured or even funded by wealthy abortion funds or sympathetic state governments. CDC data backs this up.

Colorado shows 3,924 women from out of state seeking abortions there in 2022, about 2,400 more than in 2021.  Out-of-state abortions in Illinois jumped by more than five thousand from 2021 to 2022.  The number of abortions overall more than doubled during that time in New Mexico with more than 62% being performed on women from other states in 2022.

States such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Oregon, and Washington–each with aggressive abortion activist governors–all saw increases not just in the overall number of abortions but the number of out-of-state abortions as well.

Given the large numbers traveling out of state for abortions, that the CDC shows abortions nationally declining overall is both remarkable and encouraging. The absence of data from California and other states for both years, however, makes the full and final impact unclear and uncertain.

Large increases in out-of-state abortions were also seen in other states such as Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina. Due to legal and legislative arguments going on in those states in Dobbs’ immediate wake, abortion was more readily available there at that time than it was in neighboring states.

The number of recorded abortions there, among both state citizens and out-of-state travelers, would be expected to decrease in coming years as the CDC data catches up with more recent changes in state laws.

Chemical abortions continue rising

Amidst the good news from the CDC is a cautionary note. The number of chemical or “medication” abortions using drugs such as mifepristone and/or misoprostol continued to rise, from 56% of recorded abortions in 2021 to 57.7 % in 2022, a relatively large increase in just a year’s time.

Other sources (which ostensibly include data from abortion giants such as California and several of the other states that CDC figures lack) place the national percentage at 63% for 2023.

This is important because data from the abortion industry show that, thanks to recent actions by the Biden administration, there has been an increasing number of abortions by women using pills that they ordered over the internet and had shipped to their homes.

How many of these are officially reported in any state statistics and how well they are recorded in any industry studies is currently unclear. What is clear is that the abortion industry intends to use chemical abortions to make up for the abortion “deficit” brought about by new state legislation protecting the unborn.

Other insights from the data

Abortions are being performed earlier in pregnancy, not surprising due to the heavy promotion of chemical abortion developed to work before ten weeks gestation.

Statistics also show later abortions rising in 2022. Abortions at 21 weeks or more now comprise about 1.1% of all abortions. They had seemed to drop back to about 0.9% in 2021 but are closer now to levels shown in the past decade.

Unfortunately, while It is not a new development, abortion rates continued to be higher for minorities than for the rest of the population. Though abortion and demographic data from about a third of the states is missing, among reporting states, abortion rates for black women (24.4 abortions for every thousand women aged 15-44 in that demographic group) continued to be more than twice that of Hispanic women (11.6 per thousand) and more than four times what it was for white women (5.7 per thousand).

As has been the case for years, women who abort continued to be much more likely to be unmarried (87.7%).

Where previous history is known, 43.8% are known to have had at least one previous abortion. More than one in five of those having abortions in 2022 have had at least two previous abortions.

Nearly six in ten aborting women has had at least one previous live birth.

Data on maternal deaths associated with abortion is always a year behind with the CDC. But the agency reported that there had been at least five deaths due to legal abortion in 2021, showing once again that making abortion legal never automatically made it safe.

LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee.