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Medical abortion has become a more popular option than ever, as the total number of abortions in the U.S. surpassed 1 million for the first time in more than a decade, according to two new reports.
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Abortions are on the rise in the United States, despite bans that went into effect in more than a dozen states after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which struck down federal abortion rights in June 2022.
There will be more than 1 million abortions in the U.S. in 2023, the highest rate in more than a decade and a 10 percent jump from 2020, according to a report released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health. health that supports abortion rights. Recent trends also show that medical abortion is a more common option than ever before.
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Although abortions have almost stopped in the 14 states with full bans, nearly every other state had an increase in the number of abortions provided from 2020 to 2023. As the geography of abortion care shifted amid a fractured political landscape, the 10 percent increase of abortions nationally means that states without blanket bans have increased by 25% in those years.
“The drastic loss of access in ban states was offset by tremendous efforts by clinics, abortion funds, and logistical support organizations to help people in ban states access care through financial and practical support,” they wrote the authors of the report.
States bordering the ban had particularly large increases, but abortions also increased in other states where they remained legal.
“It is quite possible that while access was dramatically limited for people living in banned countries, access greatly improved for residents of non-banned countries,” the authors wrote.
In addition to state policies put in place to protect patients and access to care and increased financial support from abortion funds, Guttmacher Institute researchers suggest that improved access to telehealth in recent years may have made medication abortions more widely available.
Medical abortion has become more common than ever since Roe, according to another new Guttmacher report. Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. in 2023 — about 642,700 — were medication abortions, the report said.
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Medical abortion, also known as medical abortion, is a method by which someone ends a pregnancy by taking two pills – mifepristone and misoprostol – rather than undergoing a surgical procedure.
This option has become more common in the two decades since it became available, rising from less than 10% of all abortions in the US in 2001 to 53% in 2020 and 63% in 2023.
But mifepristone, the drug approved for use in abortion by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2000, is facing an unprecedented legal challenge. On March 26, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that puts access to the drug at risk — even in states where abortion remains legal — and raises questions about the power courts have to overrule FDA experts’ decisions about the drug’s safety. .
Misoprostol can be used alone for medical abortion and is a safe alternative, but research shows that using the two pills together is the gold standard.
Research has long established that medical abortion is safe and effective, but another recent study found this to be true even when the patient receives the drug via telehealth.
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“Any return to restrictions on the provision of medication abortions via telemedicine would be detrimental to people who either prefer or have access to only telemedicine abortions,” the Guttmacher researchers wrote in the new report. “Although the current lawsuit only concerns the use of mifepristone — and the misoprostol-only regimen is also a safe and effective method of medical abortion — anyone seeking an abortion should have access to the full range of safe and effective options.”
Guttmacher’s new reports assess abortion trends based on responses from a sample of U.S. abortion providers. They likely underestimate the number of abortions in the U.S. because the data does not include abortions performed outside the official health care system or medication abortions sent to people in states where abortion is prohibited.
CNN’s Jen Christensen and Tierney Snead contributed to this report.
