Talk abounds as to opinions of abortion, the killing of a baby in the womb. While those pro-life advocate are for saving all life at any gestation, pro-death advocates killing to save the life of the mother, or even stop the pregnency of a rape. Data now shows that those are not the primary reasons women have abortions. The real reason may surprise you.
History
After the Supreme Court ruling turned the abortion issue back to the states, states have enacted laws that limit abortion. Often, these state laws make exceptions for abortions for specific reasons, such as rape and incest, risk to the mother’s life or health, or a fetal abnormality.
New Findings
Researchers compiled data from the eight states that collected and reported 2021 data on women’s reasons for choosing abortion. They selected data from 2021, the year before Dobbs was decided, because many of these states limited abortion after Dobbs. These eight states accounted for approximately 123,000 abortions in 2021, which would have been around 13% of the U.S. total in 2020.
Reasons
Some of these states allow women to report multiple reasons for an abortion or to write in a particular reason, while others ask women to select the top reason or choose from a predetermined list. Additionally, some states provide more precise reasons than others. To develop an estimate of the percentage of abortions performed for a given reason, data were combined from each state reporting that particular reason.
Overall, standard exceptions to abortion limits are estimated to account for less than 5% of all abortions.
- Rape and incest: 0.4%
- Risk to the woman’s life or a primary bodily function: 0.3%
- Other physical health concerns: 2.2%
- Abnormality in the unborn baby: 1.2%
- Elective and unspecified reasons: 95.9%
Nonetheless, in some states, many women declined to share a reason. Conversely, in other states, multiple reasons might be reported.
Due to the voluntary nature of state abortion reporting, the total number of abortions estimated by the Guttmacher Institute in 2020 (the most recent year in which Guttmacher administered its complete abortion facility survey) is 50% higher than the official U.S. total from the CDC, which monitors U.S. abortion trends. The CDC also does not request information on reasons for abortion from the states.
