Research, reporting, and record-keeping can be a funny thing. The federal government aims to tell us what the global climate will be like a decade from now, yet it struggles to tell us what happened regarding abortion in America three years ago.
We are not interested in taking a position here on the topic of climate change, but we do pay close attention to abortion statistics, and once again the news, slow in coming as it is, is uneven.
The latest abortion surveillance (not our term) report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought welcome news that abortion rates in the United States continue to fall. But the report also underscored the chronic shortcomings of our national abortion reporting system. U.S. abortion data is increasingly inadequate for the CDC’s stated goals of measuring unintended pregnancies and pregnancy outcomes and tracking changes in clinical practice. The CDC itself admits that abortion data is incomplete, inconsistent, and insufficient for detailed analyses, and as the most recent report illustrates, the problem is only getting worse.
There is no single federal government source for the total number of abortions performed in the U.S. each year, and the state data that the CDC relies on for this report is incomplete. In 2016, only 48 out of 52 reporting jurisdictions shared any abortion data with the CDC, down from 49 in 2015. California, Maryland, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia declined to share abortion statistics. As a result, the CDC and the rest of us are forced to rely on national estimates from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, formerly part of Planned Parenthood.
Not only is the government using data from a biased source, but what they also receive from the states isn’t necessarily comparable from state-to-state and year-to-year. States set their own standards for the data they collect, and crucial information can fall through the cracks. For instance, even as chemical abortion has increased rapidly in the U.S., chemical abortion data is missing from nine reporting areas. Only 30 reporting areas consistently provided information on the types of abortion procedures used and the weeks of gestation at which abortions were performed from 2011 to 2016. Chemical abortion threatens to revolutionize and completely transform the abortion industry in the U.S., posing increased health risks for women, but inconsistent reporting complicates any efforts to measure the increase.
In the same way, states are increasingly ramping up efforts to both limit and protect abortion, but the CDC reports don’t reflect these regulations. One reason is that this data lags years behind some of the most recent legislation on abortion. Plus, as the CDC points out, because abortions are reported by the state in which they occurred rather than by the woman’s state of residence, states with high percentages of women leaving the state for abortions may have abortion rates that appear artificially low, while states to which nonresident women travel for abortions have abortion rates that appear high. The lack of detail on women’s states of residence makes impossible any detailed measurements of the effects of state abortion laws.
Abortion trends in the U.S. are rapidly changing, and the abortion industry is adapting, but our federal government can’t capture these changes in its data because it is years behind. Broad national estimates are not enough: We need detailed, accurate data from every state. It is far past time that our government stopped relying on “best guess” estimates from the former research arm of Planned Parenthood and instead implemented a thorough, complete national system.
Abortion is a critical issue in the U.S., and given its prominence in the national spotlight, our government’s national reports should reflect its level of importance. On abortion, as well as on the climate, we should want the best data so that we know which way the winds blow.
Chuck Donovan is the president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, where Tessa Longbons is a research associate. Longbons has authored CLI’s individual state abortion reports as well as the comprehensive report, “Abortion in the United States 2017: Preliminary Review and a Call for Review.”
