CDC Report: Abortions Down Again in 1998.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

The absence of four states from the government's national abortion statistics database means it is difficult to get a precise handle on the most recent annual number of abortions in the United States. However, the latest available data for 46 states and the city health departments of New York City and Washington, D.C., appear to clearly confirm one critically important finding: there were fewer abortions performed in 1998 than in 1997, continuing the downward trend in place since 1990.

According to a June 7, 2002, report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 884,273 abortions reported to the government in 1998. Missing was any data from Alaska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and California. California is one of the states typically reporting the highest numbers of abortions, guaranteeing the actual number was several hundred thousand abortions higher.

One way of trying to gauge the CDC figures for 1998 is to go back to 1997 numbers and subtract the total for the four states which did not appear in 1998.

With all 50 states reporting in 1997, the CDC reported 1,186,039 abortions. Were we to subtract the abortions reported by Alaska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and California (the four missing for 1998), the total for 1997 drops to 900,171.

But this figure is still almost 16,000 more than reported for the same 46 states in 1998. This would mean the number of abortions performed dropped nearly 2% from 1997 to 1998.

(There is one other complicating factor. The CDC figure will always be lower than the actual total, since the initiative to produce the data must come from the states themselves. By contrast, the Alan Guttmacher Institute actively surveys abortion clinics, producing a roughly 10%-12% higher number generally believed to be much more accurate. Both sets of figures, however, provide useful information about trends.)

Other indicators are positive as well. The abortion ratio, by which the CDC means the number of abortions per 1,000 live births, was 264 for reporting areas in 1998. For 1997, the figure was 274 abortions per thousand live births for those same reporting areas.