Despite the wave of state abortion bans that took effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, the number of abortions performed in the US fell by only 2% that year, according to the first major report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to tally abortion provision in the post-Roe United States.
The findings in the report, released Wednesday, echo other research that has uncovered that US abortion rates have surprisingly risen in the years since Roe’s demise. In 2023, the US saw more than 1m abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortions and restrictions on the procedure – the highest number recorded in more than a decade.
“It really speaks to a bifurcation of access,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher Institute data scientist. “On one hand, you have many states where abortion has gotten incredibly difficult to access – states with total bans, states with six-week bans. Access has gotten much more difficult for people living in those states. And then, on the other hand, you have states with more protective laws where a lot of the things that people have been doing to ameliorate the effects of bans have also increased access to residents of those states.”
The CDC report found that US providers performed more than 613,000 abortions in 2022, only a slight drop from the nearly 626,000 abortions performed in 2021. Other metrics of abortion provision also remained similar to past years. Like in the Roe era, the vast majority of abortions took place at or before nine weeks of pregnancy, according to the CDC. Just over 6% of abortions took place 14 to 20 weeks into pregnancy, and about 1% took place at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. Women in their 20s accounted for the bulk of abortion patients. Almost 60% of abortion patients had also previously given birth.
However, the CDC report arrives with a number of asterisks. Its data is not comprehensive, since four states – California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey – do not supply the agency with data about the abortions performed in their jurisdictions. (The Guttmacher Institute research does include these states.) Some states also do not provide the CDC with demographic data on their abortion patients.
The CDC report also does not include data on abortions performed outside of the US healthcare system. Past research has indicated that, in the six months after Roe fell, roughly 26,000 more Americans used pills to induce their own at-home abortions than would have done so if Roe had not collapsed. (Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to self-manage your own abortion using pills early on in pregnancy.)
The holes in the CDC data have infuriated some abortion opponents. Project 2025, the infamous playbook of conservative policies, suggests that states lose federal funding if they do not supply the CDC with data on “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”. It also suggests that the CDC capture data on miscarriages, stillbirths, and “treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy)”.
The increased availability of abortion pills almost certainly helps explain why the numbers haven’t fallen. Eight states have enacted “shield laws” that legally protect providers who use telemedicine to mail abortion pills to people living in states with abortion bans. Between April and June 2024, shield laws enabled providers to offer a monthly average of 7,700 telehealth abortions to people in states with total or six-week bans, according to data from #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.
Despite the national picture, the number of abortions performed in several states that enacted near-total abortion bans after Roe fell dropped precipitously, the CDC found. The number of abortions performed in Alabama, which outlawed almost all abortions midway through 2022, dropped by more than half between 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, states that have become abortion havens started performing far more abortions. Kansas, which borders multiple anti-abortion states, performed almost 5,000 more abortions in 2022 than it did in 2021 – indicating that women in states with abortion bans are traveling for the procedure.
“We estimate that, in 2023, around 168,000 people traveled across state lines to access abortion care, which is more than double the number of people who traveled in 2019 or 2020,” Maddow-Zimet said. “It speaks to the way that people are going to really great lengths – often with a lot of support from a lot of other organizations – in order to be able to access abortion care when they need it.”
Organizations such as abortion funds have long helped abortion patients pay for travel. However, as outrage over Roe’s demise has died down, many of those funds have begun to run out of money – which could, in turn, lead abortion provision overall to fall.
“We have a system right now that’s really reliant on people donating large amounts of money, people working overtime – both providers and support organizations – to get people access,” Maddow-Zimet said. “Whether that is something that can be sustained in the long run, I think is a big question.”
