Abortion Totals, Rates, Ratios Drop to Lowest Levels in Decades Number of partial-birth abortions triples.

On the heels of encouraging, though somewhat incomplete, abortion data for 1998 and 1999 provided by the federal government, the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) has released data from its own 2000 survey of abortionists confirming the continued decline in abortion totals, rates, and ratios.

According to AGI, there were 1,312,990 abortions performed in the U.S. in 2000. This is about 47,000 fewer than it recorded in its last survey in 1996 and nearly 300,000 fewer than the 1990 AGI estimate of just over 1.6 million abortions.

AGI's figures are markedly higher than those reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but are more accurate. AGI directly surveys abortionists, rather than using voluntary reports from state health departments as the CDC does. In addition, recently the CDC has been unable to get numbers from several large states.

CDC's numbers, thus, always represent an undercount. CDC numbers are helpful, nonetheless. (See NRL News, January 2003.) AGI, a special research affiliate of abortion mega-chain Planned Parenthood, has the advantage of being an industry insider.

Beyond the raw totals, AGI data on the abortion rate also show this downward trend. According to AGI, the abortion rate for 2000 was 21.3 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age (ages 15-44).

While just a tenth of a point below the rate AGI estimated for 1999, that is substantially below the rates reported for the early 1980s, which ranged from 28/1,000 to 29.3/1,000. One actually has to go back to the earliest days post-Roe (1974) to find a year with a lower reported abortion rate (19.3)

Arguments can and have been made, however, that there might be fewer abortions simply because there are fewer women in the age category or fewer pregnancies altogether (due to abstinence, contraception, etc.). The lower abortion rate shows that not just fewer women but that a smaller overall percentage of fertile women are having abortions. Taken alone, this indicates that abortion is less common among that group, but does not tell us why.