Abortion

First, the number of abortions is down since the early 1990s. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided, there were 615,831 abortions which translates to an abortion ratio of 196 abortions per 1,000 live births and an abortion rate of 14 per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44.

The number of abortions peaked in 1990 at 1,429,247, yielding a ratio of 344 abortions per 1,000 live births and a rate of 24 per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. From that high, the number of abortions reported to the CDC had declined to 854,122 by 2002. (This number is artificially low, however. California, Alaska and New Hampshire stopped reporting their data to the CDC in 1998. In one year, the CDC estimated that women in California had 275,000 abortions, which would boost the U.S. total to more than 1 million.)

The Alan Guttmacher Institute compiles its own data from surveys of abortion providers. The institute's data indicate that there were about 800,000 abortions in 1973 and that the number doubled to around 1.6 million in 1990. Since then the number fell to just under 1.3 million in 2002. This implies that the CDC is missing data for about 450,000 abortions.

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