Abortion Rate Drops to Lowest Level in Over Thirty Years

This just in: according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, the 2005 rate of abortion in the U.S. was the country’s lowest since 1974.  The total number of abortions has dropped, too.

I have to say that this makes me uneasy, and not because I think that abortion is the best thing ever (though I certainly think that it’s far from being the worst). It’s because it comes down to a question of access vs. prevention. Though I’d love to be as optimistic as Planned Parenthood’s Cecil Richards and believe that the drop has a lot to do with reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies, but I’m skeptical. The Guttmacher Institute has not taken a position on the cause, though they do note that the number of abortion providers dropped in 2005 — by 2% if you count all abortion access, by 8% if you take into account that there was a small gain in the availability of medical abortion, despite the drop in surgical availability.  The number of providers dropped in 26 States.
Noting that teenage abortion rates have also dropped, anti-choicers claim that abstinence-only education is to thank. While I certainly don’t believe that, seeing as how teen sex rates are up, it’s quite possible that comprehensive sex education could be the cause. Though abstinence-only education is certainly prevalent, I think it’s quite possible that those who do receive comprehensive sex education are receiving better comprehensive sex ed than they would have in the past.

There may be some validity to this theory.  In 2005, as I noted in the last post I just linked to, the rate of teen pregnancy reached an all time low before bouncing back up for the first time in 15 years in 2006.  I mused at the time that the abortion statistics would be interesting once they became available.  The question will be whether or not the downward abortion trend continued into 2006.  Just yesterday, Amanda wrote about how the U.S. birth rate went up across the board in 2006, by 3% from 2005.  She speculated that this too may have something to do with a decrease in the availability of abortion and I tend to agree, though this study hasn’t proven one way or the other.

There are a few possibilities with what we know. One is that women are not having more unplanned pregnancies, but are indeed having more planned pregnancies, which has balanced out the pregnancy rate but increased the birth rate. Another is that more women who have unplanned pregnancies are choosing of their own free will to carry their pregnancies to term. And the last is that women who would otherwise have abortions cannot due to lack of accessibility and the increased costs that come with lower accessibility, either through abortion providers closing up shop or through more restrictive abortion regulations (parental notification, “informed consent,” etc.).

I don’t think that we know enough yet to argue without question that the last option is the culprit. If the Guttmacher Institute isn’t willing to go out on that limb, neither am I. We don’t even know if the abortion rate has dropped among women who experience pregnancy, only that it has dropped among the entire female population.  But I still consider the access issue to be a very strong possibility.
There is some good news, by the way: not only is medical abortion more widely available, women who have abortions are also having them earlier in their pregnancies (therefore causing less risk and physical trauma), and the average cost of abortion has dropped since 2000, when taking inflation into account, but not with accounting for other expenses like travel, child care and lost wages.  What do you make of all the findings?