By Randall K. O’Bannon Ph.D.
While nothing captures the incalculable human
loss, it can be said that the story of war–its victories, its
losses, its flow–can be tracked by its numbers. And while we would
never reduce the abortion holocaust America has endured to mere
numbers, we can look at the last 40 years of abortion statistics to
get some idea of the state and progress of efforts to restore
respect and legal protection for the lives of the unborn.
As of today, we know that more than 55 million
have perished in this war on the unborn. But while this assault has
been relentless, it has not necessarily been a steady or un-thwartable
attack. Policies, funding, and the marketing of new methods have
made the numbers of abortions go up. New laws, public education, and
the offer of life-affirming alternatives have made the numbers go
down.
Thus one can see where we’ve been, where we’re
going, and where we’ve got work to do by looking more closely at the
numbers. And hopefully, our efforts will be more fruitful for it.
There were abortions before Roe v. Wade.
Not as many as the other side likes to pretend, but there were
states which legalized abortion before the Supreme Court’s decision
in 1973 and places where abortions were performed illegally. But the
numbers mushroomed in the wake of Roe, going from 744,600 in
that first year after Roe and more than doubling before the
decade ended, reaching 1,497,700 by 1979.
Though the pro-life community organized and
became active soon after the first states began to legalize
abortion, those early years largely belonged to the expanding
abortion establishment, especially given the funding it received
from the federal government. By 1976, the federal Medicaid program
was paying for close to 300,000 abortions annually, inflating
national totals, with the number on the rise.
One of the pro-life movement’s first substantial
victories came when Henry Hyde, a pro-life congressman from
Illinois, offered an amendment to the annual Health and Human
Services appropriation bill prohibiting the use of any of those
funds for performing abortions. It passed, but was in and out of the
courts before finally being ruled constitutional in 1980. Though the
number of abortions would go up or down by tens of thousands over
the next decade, it is worth noting that the rapid rise seen in the
1970s halted when the Hyde Amendment took effect.
How big a difference did the Hyde Amendment make?
In a 1993 letter to California congressman Vic Fazio, Robert
Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that
if Medicaid funded abortion to the same extent it covered other
pregnancy services (essentially the policy in place before Hyde),
“the federal government would probably fund between 325,000 and
675,000 abortions each year.”
There were other pro-life efforts that had an
impact. Supreme Court decisions in 1979 (Bellotti v. Baird (II))
and 1981 (HL v. Matheson) gave the states leeway to pass
parental involvement legislation, requiring that a teen’s parents be
notified of her intent to get an abortion or give permission for the
abortion to proceed. While abortion numbers remained relatively
stable throughout the 1980s, varying between 1.5 and 1.6 million a
year, it is worth noting that abortions to teens began dropping as
early as 1981 with their abortions accounting for a smaller and
smaller percentage of the overall number.
Other things were happening on the technological
and cultural fronts. The proliferation of ultrasonography not only
confirmed what pro-lifers had said about the humanity of the unborn
child, but helped to educate the general public about that fact
every time a beaming young pregnant mother brought out the
ultrasound picture of her baby and passed it around the office.
Fetal heartbeat stethoscopes made plain for anyone willing to listen
that abortion did indeed stop a beating heart. The media validated
pro-life claims with widely watched features and documentaries on
fetal development.
Pregnancy care centers (or as they were known
then, crisis pregnancy centers) popped up all over the country as
pro-lifers looked for practical ways to challenge abortion in their
communities. They offered women life-affirming alternatives to
abortion.
All these factors gave the pro-life effort a
certain momentum that was soon to show a tangible impact.
While abortions peaked at 1,608,600 in 1990,
there were already indications that the numbers were dropping.
Abortion rates (the number of abortions per thousand women of
reproductive age 15-44) and ratios (calculated differently by
different statisticians, but some ratio of abortions to live births)
both began to drop in the 1980s, but really saw declines in the
1990s.
Raw numbers of abortions themselves began to fall
sharply in 1990s, dropping from 1.6 million a year to about 1.3
million in 1998, just a few years later. Notable during this time
frame was the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood of
Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) allowing states to
pass informed consent, or “right to know” laws, ensuring that
pregnant women seeking abortions knew of the abortion’s risk, the
developmental stage of their unborn children, and alternatives and
assistance available to them.
It should not be forgotten that it was also
during this period that a ban on partial-birth abortion first began
to be discussed. Though the bill itself did not become law until
receiving President George W. Bush’s signature in 2003, and was not
declared constitutional by the Supreme Court until 2007, legislative
discussions of the heinous procedure began back in 1995. That
lengthy debate for the first time forced many in the mainstream
media to actually discuss what an abortion was and what it did to
the unborn child.
Declines have continued into the 2000s, until the
point today where the annual figure is closer to 1.2 million a year,
still too much by any counting, but a 25% drop from numbers seen
just 20 years ago. Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control’s
2009 Abortion Surveillance, the latest national report, indicate
another big drop could be in the offing.
Though hampered by reliance on the reports of
state health departments, and missing data from states such as
abortion giant California since at least 1998, the federal agency,
also known as the CDC, provides valuable demographic data on
abortion. Moreover, its raw numbers roughly track those obtained by
the private research group Guttmacher Institute, which surveys
abortionists directly, though less frequently.
CDC figures for 2009 show nearly a 5% drop from
the previous year. Whether this is some statistical anomaly or
indication of the initiation of a new long-term trend, only time
will tell. Factors such as the sudden economic downturn can have an
impact, as do falling pregnancy rates, but so do new pieces of
legislation such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act or
ultrasound viewing laws that have passed in recent years.
It does not necessarily portend easy sailing in
the years ahead. Each time the pro-life movement has had a triumph,
there has been a push back from the pro-abortion side. We elect
pro-life political leaders, they elect supporters of abortion. We do
grassroots organizing, they mobilize the media and Hollywood
celebrities. We watch an old dirty clinic close, they open a giant
new modern abortion mega-center. We ban a method of abortion, they
come up with a new abortion technology, such as web-cam abortions
with abortion pills like RU-486.
That we have made the progress against a
well-financed opposition, is a testimony to the dedication of our
people and the rightness of our cause.
The statistics show us areas where we have much
more work to do. While we have seen abortion rates drop sharply
among white women, rates are still extremely high for
African-American women and are on the increase for Hispanics. The
progress we have made with teens aborting less often means that
aborting women are trending older. In addition statistics from both
Guttmacher and the CDC indicate that about 60% of aborting women
have already given birth to at least one child.
But the numbers do not lie. Thanks to your
unceasing efforts, we have made considerable progress. There are
millions of children alive today who would have perished if trends
had continued as they were, if pro-lifers had not been there with
legislation, education, outreach, and practical help.
That’s quite a living legacy to build on. (See also, page 14.)
