Both the number and rate of abortions reported in the US fell 2% from 2019 to 2020, according to new data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC requests abortion data each year from all 50 states and other jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia and New York City, and researchers compare it to census and birth data. The latest findings were published Wednesday. They show there were 615,911 abortions in 2020 in 48 reporting areas that provided data every year from 2011 to 2020, down from 625,346 in 2019. The abortion rate in these areas from 2019 to 2020 fell from 11.4 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 to 11.2 per 1,000 women.
From 2011 to 2020, the total number of reported abortions fell 15% and the abortion rate fell 18%.
The abortion ratio – the number of abortions relative to live births – also decreased from 2011 to 2020 overall. But it ticked up slightly between 2019 and 2020, as total births declined in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.