National Right to Life Committee, 2021

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Abortion Drop Continues

There are two basic courses on abortion incidence in the United States:

• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publishes yearly, but relies on voluntary reports from state health departments (and New York City, Washington, D.C.). It has been missing data from California, New Hampshire, and at least one other state since 1998.
• The Guttmacher Institute (GI) contacts abortion clinics directly for data but does not survey every year.
• Because it surveys clinics directly and includes data from all 50 states, most researchers believe Guttmacher’s numbers to be more reliable, though Guttmacher still believes it may miss some abortions.

Both the CDC and Guttmacher show significant recent drops and sustained drops over the last 25 years.

• Total abortions dropped 29.9 percent from 1998 to 2016 with the CDC, and fell 46.4 percent from 1990 to 2017 with GI.
• Total abortions fell below 1 million for the first time in 2013 count and have continued downward to 862,320 in the most recent figures for 2017.
• The abortion rate for 2017 for GI was 13.5 abortions for every 1,000 women of reproductive age (15-44), less than half what it was in 1981 (29.3) and even lower that when abortion was legalized in the U.S. in 1973 (16.3).
• Guttmacher says there were 18.3 abortions for every 100 pregnancies ending in live birth or abortion in 2016, 18.4 for 2017, lower abortion ratios than any since 1972.
• Guttmacher says that the number of abortion “providers” has dropped from a high of 2,918 in 1982 to 1,587 in 2017.
• Most of the reduction in abortions seen between 2008 and 2017 occurred in facilities performing a thousand or more abortions a year. A loss of 122 such facilities from 2008 to 2017 was accompanied by a decline of 346,280 abortions, virtually all of the drop between those years.
• The percentage performed with chemical abortifacients like mifepristone rose from 16.4 percent in 2008 to 39.4 percent in 2017.

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Reported Annual Abortions – 1973-2015

YEAR	GI	CDC
1973	744,610	615,831
1974	898,570	763,476
1975	1,034,170	854,853
1976	1,179,300	988,267
1977	1,316,700	1,079,430
1978	1,409,600	1,157,776
1979	1,497,670	1,251,921
1980	1,553,890	1,297,606
1981	1,577,340	1,300,760
1982	1,573,920	1,303,980
1983	1,575,000	1,268,987
1984	1,577,180	1,333,521
1985	1,588,550	1,328,570
1986	1,574,000	1,328,112
1987	1,559,110	1,353,671
1988	1,590,750	1,371,285
1989	1,566,900	1,396,658
1990	1,608,600	1,429,247
1991	1,556,510	1,388,937
1992	1,528,930	1,359,146
1993	1,495,000	1,330,414
1994	1,423,000	1,267,415
1995	1,359,400	1,210,883
1996	1,360,160	1,225,937
1997	1,335,000	1,186,039
1998	1,319,000	884,273 *
1999	1,314,800	861,789 *
2000	1,312,990	857,475 *
2001	1,291,000	853,485 *
2002	1,269,000	854,122 *
2003	1,250,000	848,163 *
2004	1,222,100	839,226 *
2005	1,206,200	820,151 *
2006	1,242,200	846,181 *
2007	1,209,640	827,609 *
2008	1,212,350	825,564 *
2009	1,151,600	789,116 *
2010	1,102,670	765,651 *
2011	1,058,490	730,322 *
2012	1,011,000	699,202 *
2013	958,700	664,435 *
2014	926,190	652,639 *
2015	899,500	638,169 *
2016	874,100	623,471 *
2017	862,320	612,719 *
2018-20	862,320 **	619,820 *

Updated: January 2021

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National Right to Life — Abortion Statistics: United States Data and Trends, January 2021