Fewer unintended pregnancies helped drive the abortion rate to a new low in 2017, according to a report published Wednesday by the Guttmatcher Institute.
The rate of abortions dropped to 13.3 abortions per 1,000 women in 2017, which translates to 862,320 abortions performed that year. The number is 7% lower than it was in 2014 and the lowest since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.
The study comes at a time when states are moving in different directions on abortion rights as they anticipate the Supreme Court, which has two new additions under President Trump, may reconsider its Roe decision. Blue states have enshrined abortion rights and loosened restrictions on abortions later in a pregnancy. Red states have passed six-week “heartbeat” bans on abortion that do not provide exemptions for rape or incest, which have been blocked and challenged in court.
In 2017, the year of the Guttmacher study, abortion restrictions that were enacted or were already in place were less direct than all-out bans. Instead, states implemented waiting periods, bans on later abortions, or layout requirements for clinics. The restrictions were effective in leading more clinics to close, with the study showing a 6% decline in abortion providers in the Midwest and a 9% decline in the South.
But those restrictions do not appear to have helped the abortion rate drop because abortions declined even in states where abortion was more widely available, according to the researchers at Guttmacher, which supports abortion rights.
Instead, they credited the reduced abortion rate to a drop in the number of women who are getting pregnant in the first place. More women are using birth control since the passage of Obamacare, which gave the federal government the authority to mandate that private health insurers cover a range of contraception without charging patients. Those rules have been loosened under the Trump administration, which allows for moral or religious exemptions, but a legal battle over its changes is underway.
It’s also possible that the reduction in abortions can be attributed to women requesting the abortion pill online and taking it at home, though such a figure would be hard to nail down as women would not report the procedure. Guttmacher had data showing that 18% of clinics reported they had seen patients who tried to end a pregnancy on their own, an increase from 12% in 2014.
Abortion rights advocates have been pushing the Food and Drug Administration, which is cracking down on online abortion services, to revisit the restrictions it has on the abortion pill. Under the current regulations, medical providers have to give the first of two pills to patients in person.
The data released Wednesday are more recent and more complete than the ones provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every year. The CDC figures do not include information from California, Maryland, and New Hampshire; therefore, its tally of abortions, 638,169, appears lower. The Guttmacher Institute uses information from all known 808 abortion facilities.
