After Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, it seemed only natural that births would increase and abortion rates would decline.
Conversely, last year saw a rise in abortions and a historic low in the nation’s fertility rate.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advocates for access to abortion, the number of abortions performed in the United States in 2023 exceeded one million, the most in ten years. Preliminary data indicates that abortion rates so far this year have not changed significantly from the final six months of 2023.
Diana Greene Foster, a reproductive health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, stated that the post-Dobbs world wasn’t as horrible as we had anticipated. Before Dobbs, abortions were actually prohibited. It’s probably happening after Dobbs, but not to the degree I was concerned about.
In 2022, Foster projected that 25% of women in states where abortion is illegal will give birth instead. She now believes that the share could be in the low single digits.
What prevented the decline in abortion rates?
By spending a day at an Illinois Planned Parenthood clinic, meeting with the Dutch doctor whose work was essential to maintaining access to abortion pills in the United States, and interviewing important figures from various sectors of the abortion rights landscape, including providers, researchers, directors of abortion funds, advocates, attorneys, policy experts, and anti-abortion organizations, NBC News was able to find the people and systems behind the trend.
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