Abortion "Providers" and the Cost of Abortions

Coincident with the drop in abortions, AGI tells us, has been a continuing decline in the number of abortionists, or as AGI puts it, "abortion providers."

There were 2,380 abortionists in 1992, 2,042 in 1996, and 1,819 in 2000, according to AGI. The figure for 2000 represents a drop of 11% from the 1996 survey and a decrease of over 37% from the all-time high of 2,908 recorded in 1982.

AGI reports that 61% of "abortion providers" perform fewer than 400 a year. The mega-clinics--those performing a thousand or more abortions a year--are responsible for approximately four of five of all the abortions, AGI reports.

AGI takes pains to point out that some 87% of U.S. counties lack an identified abortion "provider," counties in which it says 34% of women live. It admits, however, that such statistics may overstate the dearth in two ways.

First, a county without an abortionist may be adjacent to a county with one. Second, AGI notes, there may be counties in which abortionists are present but whose "services" aren't publicized.

While AGI advances "harassment" as one possible reason for the declining number of abortionists, it admits, "The decrease in providers was concentrated among those with small caseloads. Because many hospitals and physicians who did not perform abortions in 2000 performed few abortions in 1996, this decline probably had little impact on abortion incidence nationally."

In other words, some abortionists who performed few abortions in 1996 performed none in 2000, which accounts for most of the decline in the number of "abortion providers."

What AGI cannot bring itself to say is that many abortionists get out of the business because they can no longer face the reality of what they're doing. The same reality that drove NARAL founder Dr. Bernard Nathanson out of the abortion clinic and into the ranks of pro-lifers has gradually worn on abortionists and thinned their ranks.

In 1990 even the New York Times called abortion a "tough thing for gynecologists" and said the emotions it arouses are so strong that doctors "don't talk to each other about" (1/8/90). Five years later, the Washington Post wrote that older doctors doing abortions were disillusioned because they got in thinking of abortion "as a breakthrough in women's health and a means to prevent the birth of babies with severe genetic defects" but later came to believe it had become used as "after-the-fact birth control" (1/22/95).

The dearth of abortionists is one of the reasons behind the industry's push for mandatory abortion training in medical schools and efforts to recruit new "providers" who would use the abortion pill RU486.

AGI confirms that there is still a great deal of money to be made from abortions. In a companion piece to its article on abortion statistics, AGI notes that the average cost of an abortion in 2001 was $372 for a self-paying woman obtaining a surgical abortion at 10 weeks LMP (from her last menstrual period). It cost about $200 for the same abortion in 1983.

According to AGI, abortions performed at 16 weeks typically cost $774, while those at 20 weeks ran $1,179.

Employing such estimates, the average abortionist with a caseload of a thousand first-trimester surgical abortions a year brings in a minimum of $372,000. If he does more, if he charges more, if he does later abortions, that figure grows dramatically.

AGI says some 74% of women pay for abortions with their own money (or with money from their "partner"). Some 13% of abortions are covered by Medicaid.