Abortions Hit Recent High, 1.12 Million Babies Killed as Abortion Pills Flourish

Since the Dobbs decision, the Guttmacher Institute has been publishing monthly abortion estimates based on data submitted from a national sample of abortionists. In the last few weeks, it has compiled these monthly totals and published a new estimate for abortions in 2024 – 1,126,970.

Guttmacher says this number reflects 1,050,660 abortions “provided by clinicians in U.S. states without a total ban in 2024″ plus an additional 76,310 “provided via telehealth to states with total bans in 2024,” according to estimates Guttmacher takes from the Society of Family Planning (SFP).

SFP does its own count of abortions and gets reports of pills ordered and shipped to pro-life states from online pill sellers from protected shield law states.

If accurate, this would reflect an increase of more than sixty thousand from the total Guttmacher reported for 2023 – 1,060,880 — although more people may have seen their original figure of 1,035,360 which did not include the 2023 telehealth abortions from 2023.

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There are reasons, which we’ll get to in a minute, to think these numbers may be inflated. The important thing to note is that the vector for these reported numbers is on the upslope, continuing an upward trend that has been seen since at least 2017, when abortions hit 862,220, their lowest level since 1973.

Abortions turned upward after 2017. The estimates were going back over a million in 2022, the year Dobbs was handed down and then appear to have gone even higher after that.

How did they get these numbers and are they reliable?

That abortion industry reports show increases is significant (and troubling), but exactly how much they are really up and what this all means is still very much an open question.

Obviously, pro-lifers hoped that the fall of Roe would finally give pro-life states the opportunity to protect mothers and their unborn children from the horrors of abortion. And it seems that in many states, it has. In those states there has been not only a drop in numbers of abortions but also increases in birth rates. This is a clear indication that legal protections are having an effect and more women are choosing life for themselves and their children.

As expected, the abortion industry has redoubled its efforts. It has raised and spent millions to “help” women travel to clinics in abortion friendly states and ignored laws and safety concerns to ship abortion pills to many in pro-life states.

Guttmacher used to survey abortion providers directly. Often it took years to compile and complete its data, but it gave what most observers considered a fairly accurate estimate. It was on the basis of those estimates that pro–lifers saw abortions falling from the peak of 1.6 million a year in 1990 to less than a million a year in 2013 before turning up again in 2018.

But Guttmacher changed the way it collected data and created its estimates it after Dobbs. Because many abortion clinics closed, and a lot of abortionists moved or retired, Guttmacher chose to rely on a selected sample of “providers” and to use their reports to project numbers for the rest.

This might be acceptable if the situation after Dobbs had been similar to what it was before. In fact, though, circumstances were radically different after 2022, with so many abortionists getting out of the business or in new positions or locations.

With the “market” undergoing such major churning, determining which “providers” were representative and using the caseloads at major abortion mega-clinics (set up to handle heavy travel volume) to estimate for the rest of abortionists was statistically problematic, at best.

Overestimation by abortionists anxious to prove their continued viability is easy to imagine, which could result in the publishing of tallies higher than the actual number.

The presence of online chemical abortion merchants, which the Biden administration authorized before leaving office, who mailed pills to thousands in pro-life states, further complicated the counting.

Some groups like SFP have gotten reports from online abortion pill sellers such as Aid Access, or others, and used those to project the number of chemical abortions happening in pro-life states. Beyond the problem of trusting these groups’ self-serving sales statistics, there is the additional problem of conflating sales of abortion pills with use of abortion pills.

For example, a woman may order the pills but not use them, either changing her mind or simply storing them for future use (as many sellers have recommended). Or she may use them and they may not work, as we know is the case at least 2-7% of the time. Or she may use them and then try to reverse the process to save her baby.

These sales occur online and there is often little to no verification of identify, much less pregnancy. These pills may be going to a boyfriend trying to slip these into his girlfriend’s smoothie, as has already happened multiple times.

The point is, one cannot make an automatic one-to-one correspondence between the sale of abortion pills and occurrence of an abortion. Estimates generated this way are inherently flawed.

Saving lives is the bottom line

While you can’t get a precise number of abortions from Guttmacher, SFP, or even any of the government sources, you can learn a few things from this latest report.

First, after Dobbs, the abortion industry did not close up shop and disappear. They prepared for and adapted to the new circumstances. They built mega-clinics in abortion friendly states, trained former clinic employees to act as travel agents and stashed away millions in private abortion funds to help send women to other states.

Second, related to the first, they prepared for this day by developing chemical abortion and getting the government to authorize the mailing of abortion pills to women ordering these online. This development, added to women traveling out of state, has been responsible for abortion numbers remaining stable, or even increasing even in states trying to legally protect mothers and their children from abortion.

Though we consider these numbers exaggerated, and believe the evidence shows many lives saved by the new legal protections, pro-lifers still obviously still have a lot of work to be done in those states if we want to see abortion numbers there substantially drop again.

All of us understand that there are innocent lives, and not simply numbers, at stake.

LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee.

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