(LifeSiteNews) – A new report claims that total abortions were actually higher in the first months of 2024 than in the months before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which if true would mean efforts to dispense abortion pills remotely are outpacing the number of lives saved by newly enforceable pro-life laws. But pro-lifers have identified reasons to question the findings.
On Wednesday, the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning (SFP) released its #WeCount Report, a study of data on clinician-provided abortions from April 2022 to March 2024. It estimates that broad abortion bans that took effect in 14 states after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling have prevented a total of 208,040 in-person abortions in those states, yet nationwide found an average of 98,990 abortions per month from January through March 2024 compared with a monthly average of 84,000 from April through May 2022, shortly before Dobbs in June.
“This increase in the national totals appears to be driven by the increase in telehealth abortions,” the group says. “Excluding abortions provided under shield laws and by brick-and-mortar clinics (as collection of these data by #WeCount began in July 2023), the national monthly number of telehealth abortions in January-March 2024 is 28% higher than the national monthly number of telehealth abortions in January-March 2023. The national monthly number of in-person abortions in January-March 2024 is about the same (1% lower) than the national monthly number of in-person abortions in January-March 2023.”
“Nationally, telehealth abortions grew from 4% of all abortions in April 2022 to 20% in March 2024,” the report added. “Telehealth represented 21% of all abortions in January 2024, 19% in February, and 20% in March. The number of telehealth abortions provided by all categories of providers (e.g., virtual-only, brick-and-mortar) appear to be increasing.”
Reacting to the news, Catholic University of America professor and Charlotte Lozier Institute scholar Michael New expressed that a degree of skepticism is in order. He noted that SFP “really had no previous experience doing abortion estimates prior to Dobbs,” and many of their state estimates differ significantly from those of the Guttmacher Institute, which while pro-abortion is taken by most on both sides to be the most comprehensive source of abortion data. Guttmacher’s national abortion estimate for 2022 was 951,168, followed by 912,360 in 2023, a decrease of 38,808.
A new report says since the overturning of Roe v Wade, the number of monthly abortions in the US has gone up. Senior Associate Scholar at the @LozierInstitute and a professor at the @CatholicUniv, @Michael_J_New, shares his initial reaction to this report. pic.twitter.com/mi6BU5OGFx
— EWTN News Nightly (@EWTNNewsNightly) August 8, 2024
Last October, New noted that a previous release from SFP claiming that abortion pills had completely negated pro-life laws missed factors such as Texas and Oklahoma already enforcing strong laws before Dobbs, among other issues.
Still, the findings are consistent with Planned Parenthood’s annual report earlier this year that it managed to commit a record 392,715 abortions in 2023 as well as 123,855 telehealth appointments despite the new hurdles, and it is widely believed that mail distribution of abortion pills across state lines is responsible for a significant number of abortions beyond what can be officially documented.
Last November, pro-life Operation Rescue noted that that 79% of the newly opened or reopened abortion facilities only provide abortion drugs, with just the remaining 21% performing surgical abortions. Of the latter, 99% also prescribed abortion pills.
“The medication abortion counts for 2023 do not include self-managed medication abortions that take place outside of the formal health care system or abortion medication mailed to people in states with total abortion bans,” Guttmacher wrote in March. “While there are no comprehensive data on the number of self-managed medication abortions in the United States, evidence suggests they have been increasing in the past several years. Therefore, the total count of medication abortions nationally is higher than our count of those offered within the formal health care system.”
Ever since Dobbs, the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out the deterrent effects of pro-life laws by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
Whatever the full extent of those efforts has been, they underscore that the battle over abortion is far from over at any level of government and that federal policy continues to have a significant effect regardless of how badly certain politicians want to relegate the battle to the state level.
Vice President and presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris is running to enshrine a “right” to effectively unlimited abortion nationwide, while former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump is running to the center on abortion, having recently spearheaded the removal of the GOP’s historic support for a federal ban in favor of leaving states to decide for themselves while continuing to criticize Democrats’ support for late-term abortion and infanticide.