Abortion Rates in the U.S. have Fallen, CDC Reports

By Cheri Cheng - 11 Dec '15 15:53PM

The number of women getting abortions in the United States has fallen drastically, according to new federal data.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that from 1990 to 2010, the abortion rate fell by 35 percent. Now, there are 17.7 procedures for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The report's lead author, Sally Curtin, who is a statistician for the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, noted that this rate is the lowest for the country since the CDC started monitoring in 1976.

"Abortion has been on a nearly steady decline since the rate peaked in 1980," Curtin said reported by HealthDay via CBS News.

She added, reported by TIME, "Much has been written about the birth rate, and much about the abortion rate, but a lot are shown separately. If we put abortions in context, you can see that in a given year, the numbers of abortions, which is 1.1 million, is about the same as fetal loss. It used to be very different, if you look back; the number of abortions in 1976 was almost twice that."

Along with the drop in abortion rate, the researchers also found that the U.S. pregnancy rate has also fallen to an all time low rate of 98.7 pregnancies per 1,000 women in the age group of 15 to 44. The pregnancy rate for girls aged 14 and younger fell by 67 percent. The rate in teens between the ages of 15 and 19 fell by 50 percent.

"Across the states, the rate of unintended pregnancy is going down," co-author, Kathryn Kost, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, said. "That suggests that fewer women are getting pregnant when they don't want to. It's happening across the board, and affects the birth rate and the abortion rate."

The report also examined the rates of live births and fetal loss, which included miscarriages and stillbirths. The rate of live births fell by 10 percent during the study's time frame. Fetal loss rates, however, remained pretty constant.

Overall, for every 100 pregnancies, there were 65 live births, 18 abortions and 17 fetal losses.

For more information on the report, click here.