US Abortions Hit All Time New Low in Post Roe v Wade Era
To hear the left talk about it, one would assume that abortion is not only a fundamental right of all American citizens and non-citizen residents, but also some sort of honored and treasured sacrament that everyone should embrace and be more than happy to pay for via taxpayer funding.
Of course, a substantial portion of the American population views the state-sanctioned legal murder of unborn babies as a ghastly abomination in this country, and wholly disagree with those on the left who cheer for the dismemberment of innocent people who’ve yet to be born.
Indeed, despite the left’s loud narrative that abortion is increasingly more common and growing in popularity, recently released statistics would seem to suggest the exact opposite is true, that abortion is actually becoming less common and has diminished in popularity as a despicable form of birth control in recent years.
The Washington Examiner reported that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just released a batch of admittedly incomplete data which nevertheless showed that the number of abortions performed per year was decreasing at a significant pace — at least as of 2015, the latest year for which there were numbers.
There were at least 638,169 abortions performed in 2015, a staggeringly high and disconcerting number of babies whose lives were snuffed out before they even were allowed to begin.
While that number does indeed sound tragically high, it is worth noting that the reported total was 2 percent lower than that of 2014, and an astonishing 24 percent drop from the total number of abortions in 2006, an apparent acceleration to the steady decline in abortions since the procedure reached a peak in the 1980s following the federal legalization in all states which stemmed from the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling.
To be sure, the data provided by the CDC is incomplete, as it relies on voluntarily reported data and does not include information on abortions from California, Maryland or New Hampshire. Even still, the data that has been compiled from everyone else does tend to reveal various developing patterns related to demographics and public health practices.
It should be pointed out that abortion data is collected voluntarily from states and the District of Columbia every year, but it generally takes a couple of additional years for that data to be fully assessed, verified and compiled prior to public release.
One thing that the latest batch of data shows is that the number of abortions among teen mothers has dropped dramatically since 2006, by about 41 percent. That significant drop-off is believed to be attributable to more teens abstaining from sexual intercourse and an increased usage of effective birth control among those who do engage in sex, both of which have led to a decline in the likelihood of teen pregnancies overall.
The data also showed that a large majority of abortions performed in 2015 — roughly 60 percent — were performed on women in their 20s.
Furthermore, nearly 60 percent of all abortions were performed on women who’d already given birth to at least one child previously, while some 44 percent of all abortions were performed on women who’d had at least one other prior abortion.
One rather interesting apparent trend to be discovered in the CDC data was the 11 percent increase between 2006 and 2011 of abortions being performed within the first six weeks of a pregnancy, which would suggest that more women are learning of pregnancies early on and not waiting until the baby has further developed before deciding to have an abortion.
One other piece of noteworthy data is that only six women died from complications following abortions in 2014, none of which were obtained illegally, which would suggest that while abortions are growing more rare, they are also becoming more safe as a procedure, meaning the pro-abortion crowd can finally tout with honesty their long-expressed but generally unbelievable desire to see abortion as a rare and safe medical procedure.
To be sure, the practice of abortion is still utterly abhorrent and pro-life advocates won’t be ceasing their efforts to completely obliterate the practice any time soon.
That said, those pro-life advocates can draw some encouragement from the patterns evidenced by the CDC’s numbers, in that abortions are becoming more rare and more safe over the years — patterns which suggest their advocacy is having an impact on the broader population.
Of course, those who advocate for the life of unborn babies will continue to do so — indeed, these numbers should encourage them to redouble their efforts — until abortion has become so rare and widely despised as to not even be an issue worth discussing any further. If current trends continue, that day may eventually come.
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