Abortion rates in the United States are at their lowest in 40 years, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank.
In 2011, the U.S. abortion rate was 16.9 abortions per every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the lowest it’s been since abortion was legalized in 1973.
Between 2008 and 2011, the abortion rate fell 13%, resuming the downward trend that had stalled between 2005 and 2008.
“The decline in abortions coincided with a steep national drop in overall pregnancy and birth rates,” Rachel Jones, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Contraceptive use improved during this period. … Moreover, the recent recession led many women and couples to want to avoid or delay pregnancy and childbearing.”
The study, “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2011,” is available online and will be published in the March issue of the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.
As Jones said, several variables affect abortion rates, including the economy, access to contraception and the availability of abortion services.
The pregnancy rate is the lowest it has been in 12 years. It’s possible that since there were fewer overall pregnancies, there were also fewer unintended pregnancies during this period. Both could be attributed to an uptick in more effective contraception use, authors of the study say.
Previous studies have shown that offering free contraception to women may prevent abortions. Longer-term methods, such as intrauterine devices, are as much as 20 times more effective at preventing unintended pregnancies than methods more prone to user error such as the birth-control pill or vaginal ring.
“Access to a range of birth control methods is playing an important role in reducing unintended pregnancy and decreasing the need for abortion,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “This report comes just as some politicians and corporations are trying to make it harder for women to get birth control by chipping away at the historic benefit in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance plans to cover birth control without a copay.”
Women’s access to certain types of abortion providers also matters, the authors say. In 2011, abortion clinics represented just 19 percent of facilities offering abortion services. Yet clinics performed approximately 63 percent of the procedures. The researchers concluded that “the number of clinics in particular may be a more important indicator of access than the total number of providers.”
The total number of abortion providers declined 4 percent between 2008 and 2011, according to the study. The number of clinics declined 1 percent nationwide, with much higher rates of decline in Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma and Vermont, which each lost one clinic. Although one clinic closure may seem insignificant, it may have contributed to the larger-than-average decline in the abortion rates in Kansas and Oklahoma, the study says.
Read more: CNN
