(Image by Mark Thomas from Pixabay)

After Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court decision making abortion a constitutional right, was overturned last year, it seemed clear that newly allowed pro-life laws were leading to a massive reduction in the numbers of abortions in states that passed them.
This much is still clear. But what’s less clear is whether the end of Roe has led to a decline in abortion numbers across the nation as a whole. New figures suggest that it hasn’t. The Guardian reports:

The average number of abortions performed each month in the US rose in the year after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to ban the procedure, according to data released on Tuesday from a research group backed by the Society of Family Planning.

The number of abortions performed in states with near-total or six-week abortion bans plummeted, with providers in those states performing 114,590 fewer abortions than they would have if Roe had not been overturned, according to data collected by the research group, WeCount.

At the same time, abortions rose dramatically in the states that still permit the procedure. In total, those states performed 116,790 more abortions than expected.

So according to the picture suggested by WeCount’s figures, it looks like what we’re seeing is a change in the location of abortions rather than a decline in their numbers. In general at Minimise we’ve been very sceptical of arguments that abortion bans don’t reduce abortion rates, finding them both implausible in themselves and largely unsupported by the data. It seems as though Ireland’s abortion ban had a very substantial impact on its abortion rate, which is why we saw such a big increase in our numbers post-repeal.

So it’s important to note when data comes out that seems to describe something very different happening, as this does, and to take that data seriously. We hope to do a deeper dive into post-Roe abortion figures when there’s a bit more data to work with, but for now, it’s worth asking some preliminary questions about why we’re seeing this pattern.

One possibility is that driving across state lines is in practice easier than booking a flight to a different country when trying to have an abortion, and that the former was less of a disincentive than the latter. Another is that many states have made their laws more pro-choice after Roe as well as more pro-life: both these legal changes could be having an effect but cancelling each other out. 
It could also be the case that there are problems with WeCount’s data. I’d caution against being too quick to assume this: it’s very tempting to jump on “the data is flawed” when it supports a conclusion you don’t like. Pro-lifers are subject to motivated reasoning too!

Nonetheless there are some reasons for caution. Michael New of the Charlotte Lozier Institute writes:

The #WeCount project compares a year of post-Dobbs abortion data to only two months of pre-Dobbs abortion data. This is problematic for two reasons. First, two months is a relatively small sample size of pre-Dobbs data. Abortion totals in April and May of 2022 may not be reflective of abortion totals in other months prior to the Dobbs decision. Second, Texas and Oklahoma were already enforcing strong pro-life laws before Dobbs. That makes the abortion declines in these states after Dobbs appear less dramatic.

Texas, for example, passed a so-called “heartbeat law” that banned abortions from very early in pregnancy as soon as a foetal heartbeat can be detected. There’s nothing morally significant about foetal heartbeats in my view, but these bills often serve as a de facto complete abortion ban given when pregnancies are normally discovered.

Texas’s law went into effect in September 2021 in anticipation that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe. If Roe had not been overturned in 2022, the law would have presumably been struck down. So that “backdates” some of the decline caused by the end of Roe to before its actual date. New has done some in-depth analysis of the impact of that law and found it had pretty substantial effects: his research here is particularly interesting because it looks at changes in Texas’s birth rate, which wouldn’t be changed if people were just going out of state to get abortions.

So what’s the truth about the overall impact of Roe’s overturn on abortion numbers? At this stage it’s still a bit murky.

What seems abundantly clear though is that overturning Roe alone is not having a massive impact on nationwide abortion rates. Getting rid of Roe is a necessary condition for ending abortion in the US, but it’s far from a sufficient one. If individual states keep passing pro-choice referendums like the one that just passed in Ohio, any good that the Supreme Court’s recent decision does will be extremely limited. That’s why you’ve actually got to do the slow, difficult work of convincing people that the unborn are rights-bearers and that abortion is wrong.

Ben