Curator comment: The real story here is that the abortion rate has dropped 25% from 2008 to 2014, indicating that Obama policies in place, and likely the Affordable Care Act, resulted in fewer abortions.
GRANITE CITY, IL. — Abortion access in America is narrowing. There are fewer clinics, longer drives and more restrictions earlier in pregnancy.
But something else is different: The women themselves.
Women getting abortions today are far more likely to be poor than those who had the procedure done 20 years ago.
Half of all women who got an abortion in 2014 lived in poverty, double the share from 1994, when only about a quarter of the women who had abortions were low-income, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights and conducts a national survey of abortion patients every six years.
The abortion rate has declined by nearly 40 percent since the mid-1990s. But the United States still has a higher rate of unplanned pregnancy than many other developed countries, and a growing share of women who respond by having an abortion are impoverished.
Population Group Abortion Rates and Lifetime Incidence of Abortion: United States, 2008–2014
Objectives.To assess the prevalence of abortion among population groups and changes in rates between 2008 and 2014.Methods.We used secondary data from the Abortion Patient Survey, the American Community Survey, and the National Survey of Family Growth to estimate abortion rates.We used information from the Abortion Patient Survey to estimate the lifetime incidence of abortion. Results. Between 2008 and 2014, the abortion rate declined 25%, from 19.4 to14.6 per 1000 women aged 15 to 44 years. The abortion rate for adolescents aged 15 to19 years declined 46%,the largest of any group. Abortion rates declinedf or allr acial and ethnic groups but were larger for non-White women than for non-Hispanic White women. Although the abortion rate decreased 26% for women withincomeslessthan100%of the federal poverty level, this population had the highest abortion rate of all the groups examined: 36.6. If the 2014 age-specific abortion rates prevail,24%of women aged15to44 years int hat year will have an abortion by age 45 years.
Conclusions.The decline in abortion was not uniform across all population groups.(Am J Public Health.2017;107:1904–1909. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.304042)
