U.S. abortion rate down 25% since '08

While the U.S. abortion rate has fallen by about 25 percent since 2008, the procedure continues to be common with about 1 in 4 women having an abortion by age 45, according to a report published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.

Researchers used data from three surveys, two conducted by the federal government and the third by the Guttmacher Institute, to estimate abortion rates. They found that in 2008, there were 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. By 2014, the number had dropped to 14.6 per 1,000.

The period between 2008 and 2014, several states -- including Indiana, Kansas, Texas and North Carolina -- enacted new restrictions, waiting periods or mandatory ultrasounds for women considering abortions in those states. In other parts of the country, the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion helped women who might not otherwise have been able to get an abortion get insurance coverage for the procedure.

While such policy changes affect a woman's access to and use of abortion in complex ways, co-authors Rachel Jones and Jenna Jerman, who work for the research division of Guttmacher, suggested that the main factor driving the decline in abortions was much simpler: improvements in contraceptive use.

Definitive data on unintended pregnancies for that period aren't available yet. However, other indicators support this theory, the researchers said. The teen birthrate, for one, has been declining, hitting an all-time low in 2014, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Experts also credit better access to contraception and more convenient and reliable contraception than in the past. Researchers also have suggested that teens may be having less sex.

Jones and Jerman noted that the decline in abortions was not uniform across all age, racial or income groups. The biggest decline in abortions, of 46 percent, was among women ages 15 to 19, and there has been strong evidence that contraceptive use, including more reliance on long-acting methods and intrauterine devices, was responsible for that decrease. They also noted that for the first time in 20 years, the failure rate for condoms improved.

The report did find that the abortion rate was the highest among women with incomes less than 100 percent of the federal poverty level -- or about $19,790 for a family of three -- and that abortions seem to be increasingly concentrated among the poor.

While the report said that about 49 percent of all abortion patients in the United States in 2014 were poor, the report found that for the first time in 20 years the abortion rate declined in this group. Jones and Jerman wrote that long-acting contraceptive use now appears to be as common in poor women as higher-income women.

A Section on 10/20/2017

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