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Today’s entry: With the Mississippi abortion law in the news, I was reminded of a question I’d meant to ask previously. What percentage of abortions would be affected by Mississippi’s new law? As I understand it, Mississippi’s new standard is 15 weeks but no one has said how many or what percentage of abortions happen after that point.
Bottom Line: You’ve raised a good question and there’s actually a good reason for why you likely haven’t heard a potential answer to your question. We don’t know. I wanted to address your question in part because reporting isn’t generally addressed, and I have a feeling a lot of people might not realize how abortion reports have always been conducted. Voluntarily. Due to abortions being legally considered standard medical procedures, one’s medical records are confidential and there’s no federal reporting requirement of patients or medical service providers. To the extent we’ve obtained abortion data previously, it’s been through voluntary surveys. There are two conducted nationally, one by the CDC and the other by the Guttmacher Institute.
The CDC conducts annual abortion surveys, which rely on voluntary reporting from state health agencies and Washington D.C.’s. California, the largest state in the country, along with New Hampshire haven’t participated with the CDC since 1998. This ensures that the CDC’s annual reporting on abortion is significantly understated. The method of reporting by the Guttmacher Institute is conducted by surveying abortion clinics directly across the country. It’s considered the more accurate of the two and has resulted in a significantly higher total number of abortions annually than the CDC’s reporting. Recently, the Guttmacher Institute’s survey showed 862,320 abortions performed over the past year. That compares to the CDC’s 619,820. These numbers shine the light on another dynamic in the abortion debate, which is how pervasive they are.
The peak year for abortions was 1990 when over 1.6 million occurred, they’re obviously still very frequent. There are an average of nearly 2,400 abortions per day. For the pro-choice crowd, this is about far more than a philosophical argument. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. According to the CDC, 659,000 people die of heart disease annually. Therefore, if abortions were counted as deaths, they’d being the leading cause of death in the United States by over 200,000 deaths per year. That’s the scale we’re talking about when we’re talking about abortion.
Based on the CDC’s data of the voluntarily reporting states, only 4.7% of abortions happen after week 15. I’d imagine most people would be somewhat surprised by how low that number is given the extent of the blowback against it. Even if the US Supreme Court were to uphold Mississippi’s law or perhaps even redefine the standard of “acceptable” abortions nationally to 15 weeks from the current 24 weeks, approximately 95% of abortions would still occur as they do now, and it’d still far and away be the leading cause of death if fetuses were viewed as lives.
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