Ever since the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many states have been moving to enact restrictions on abortions with varying degrees of success. In nearly though not all of these states, exceptions are made for a variety of reasons dealing with cases of rape or incest, risks to the life of the mother, or fetal abnormalities making a fruitful pregnancy unlikely. The rest of the abortions that take place without falling into any of those categories are frequently described as procedures being used as a form of birth control. With these new restrictions coming online, you might imagine that the number of abortions taking place for purposes of birth control would be shrinking in comparison to those done under the exceptions listed above. But according to new research released by LifeNews, you would be incorrect. Nearly 96% of abortions performed in recent years were done for purposes of birth control. By comparison, less than one-half of one percent of them were performed on victims who had been impregnated as a result of being raped. 

After the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, states across the country have enacted laws that limit abortion. Frequently, these state laws make exceptions for abortions for certain reasons, such as rape and incest, risk to the mother’s life or health, or a fetal abnormality. Assessing the number of abortions performed for various reasons can be challenging due to the poor quality of U.S. abortion data resulting from inconsistent reporting requirements. Periodic surveys by pro-abortion organizations have been done of women visiting abortion centers. However, these surveys do not provide a detailed look at abortions specifically performed for common legal exceptions.

For this report, we compiled publicly available data from the eight states that collected and reported 2021 data on women’s reasons for choosing abortion. We selected data from 2021, the year before Dobbs was decided, because many of these states limited abortion after Dobbs. These eight states accounted for approximately 123,000 abortions in 2021, which would have been around 13% of the U.S. total in 2020. Some of these states allow women to report multiple reasons for an abortion or to write in a particular reason, while others ask women to select the top reason or choose from a predetermined list. Additionally, some states provide more precise reasons than others. To develop an estimate of the percent of abortions performed for a given reason, data was combined from each state reporting that particular reason.

Before jumping into this too deeply, LifeNews concedes that the data used in this study was far from comprehensive or complete, so we can't assume that the resultant statistics are rock solid. The study only dealt with a limited number of states and the reporting procedures in place vary significantly from one to the next. One of the categories with questionable data was the "reason" the patient gave for desiring the procedure. Some states barely ask for a reason at all while others offer a list of possible choices including some rather vague answers. But even with all of that said, the disparity between the "classes" of abortions remains rather staggering.

Among the states examined in this study, it appears that less than five percent of all abortions are performed under one of the common exceptions listed above. The "rape or incest" exception seems to be the least common reason given. In some ways that might be viewed as potentially good news because it suggests there may be less of that going on. That's not supported by the data, of course, because while the number of forcible rapes reported in 2022 was down slightly, it was still massively above the low reported in 2011. Data on how many rapes result in pregnancy is sketchy at best and data on incest is notoriously hard to come by. Some of the best data overall comes from Florida, where patients are only allowed to select a single reason for requesting an abortion. Just three percent of those cases listed one of the common exceptions as the reason, so the overall figures are probably in the right ballpark to say the least.

Yet even if we were to assume that the margin of error was much higher, we would still be likely to see at least nine in ten abortions being done as a form of birth control. How is that possible in the modern era given the current state of reproductive science and technology? I realize I've raised this point here before and I hate to sound like a broken record, but we know what causes pregnancy. We've cracked the code. And we know how to prevent it in very nearly every situation if the people involved are not looking to start a family and want to avoid that situation. Perhaps we still have elements of either selfishness or a lack of risk-averse behavior permeating society. The NIH has long recognized that a significant percentage of single American men resist the use of condoms because, well... guys just don't like them. According to a 2022 survey, one in ten women don't use any form of birth control even if they don't want to get pregnant, and more than a third of them said they made that choice because of fears of potential side effects from birth control pills. 

Compare those issues and concerns to the reality of either winding up with a baby that neither of them wanted or scheduling an abortion. It just seems to me that we could and should be doing so much better. This isn't the hippy era anymore, people. It's the 21st century. It boggles my mind that we seem to remain unable to address this situation without needing legislative bans on abortions and all of the resultant court battles.