Abortion after ‘Dobbs,’ by the numbers

What's happened to America's abortion rate, and public opinion, since a landmark Supreme Court case?

Tens of thousands are gathering in Washington, DC, Friday for the annual March for Life demonstration.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance speaks at the 2026 March for Life. Credit: March for Life.

The annual march has been held annually since 1974, on a date close to the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which was issued on January 22, 1973, and claimed that the federal Constitution guaranteed women at least a certain level of legal access to abortion.

For most of its 52-year history, the March for Life has been a call to see that Supreme Court decision overturned — a longtime primary goal of the nation’s pro-life movement.

But three years ago, it happened.

This year’s is the third March for Life since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade. Although the Dobbs decision did not directly serve to grant legal protections to the unborn, it did allow states far greater latitude to restrict abortion.

But how has the landscape of abortion in the United States actually changed in the years since the fall of Roe v. Wade?

The Pillar looks at the numbers.

Fractured data, and rising abortion numbers

Comprehensive data on abortion has always been challenging to acquire.

The two long-standing sources in the U.S. are the data collected from the states by the Center for Disease Control and the annual surveys by the Guttmacher Institute, a research center associated with Planned Parenthood.

While the CDC data offers the promise of some degree of government-administered objectivity, it also has a blind spot, because the data since 1995 excludes information from California, Maryland, and New Hampshire, three states which do not collect and submit data on abortion.

That is particularly problematic because California, in particular, is a large and high-abortion state.

According to the Guttmacher Institute (which does collect data from California via the survey of abortion providers) the abortion rate in California in 2019 was 18.4 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, well above the national average of 14.2.

But the Guttmacher data is not complete either — the institute paused and revised its data collection and publication work after the Dobbs decision, leaving a data gap for 2021 and 2022.

But even with those challenges, the available information indicates that there has been an increase in the abortion rate over the last five to 10 years. The increase is more pronounced in the Guttmacher data than in the CDC data, perhaps because California has seen a 32% increase in annual abortions, from 139,320 in 2016 to 184,040 in 2024.

Another way to measure abortion data shows an even more distinct increase in recent years — the abortion ratio, or the number of abortions per 1,000 live births.

According to that analysis, the number of abortions has increased since reaching a low point in 2017 (when according to Guttmacher there were 862,320 abortions in the US), and the number of U.S. births has been decreasing since 2007.

The increase in abortions has been most acute in states with generally pro-abortion political climates, among them Illinois and California, but the increase in the number of abortions during recent years has been nevertheless broad-based.

Only three states saw a decrease in abortions from 2019 to 2024, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, which includes data on prescription-induced abortions, sent via mail to customers in states with more restrictive abortion laws.

Wisconsin, Georgia, and Indiana decreased their number of abortions during the five-year period, while all other states saw increased abortions to varying degrees.

The result is that the number of annual abortions nationally has increased to just more than million, numbers last seen in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s survey of abortion providers in all 50 states.

But the trend towards higher numbers of abortions may be leveling off. Since the Dobbs decision, the Guttmacher Institute has begun to publish a monthly data set on the number of abortions, based on their survey of abortion providers, which includes both surgical and prescription-induced abortions.

That monthly data is available from January 2023 to September 2025, and while there is significant month-to-month variation, it does not appear to show an upward trend.

Indeed, a trendline on those data points appears to show a slowly decreasing number of abortions per month.

Overall, what these numbers seem to show is that after a 30-year decline from an abortion peak around 1980, with the abortion rate reaching its lowest level around 2017, the last eight years see increase again, in both the total number of abortion, and the rate of abortions relative to the number of reproductive age women and the number of pregnancies.

That may to some extent be the result of the increased availability and decreased cost of prescription-induced abortions. It may also reflect a changing attitude in American culture towards pregnancy and children.

In the period when abortion rates rose rapidly immediately after the Roe v Wade decision, the number of childbirths in America was in the midst of a rapid decline connected to the development of oral contraceptives. That data can be seen in the Total Fertility Rate, a statistic which shows the average number of children a woman will have during her life given current birthrates.

From a post-war high point in 1960 of 3.65, the national Total Fertility Rate fell rapidly until it reached a low of 1.74 in 1976. After remaining near that low point for several years, fertility rates rose during the 1980s and 1990s, peaking at 2.12 in 2007. During the same period, the U.S. abortion rate fell significantly.

But over the last 15 years, the U.S. fertility rate has fallen with increasing speed, reaching a historic low of 1.59 in 2024.

Just as a cultural shift in the 1960s and 1970s saw Americans having fewer children — and as a result having more abortions — the U.S. may be seeing a similar shift away from having children happening today.

The rise of remote abortions

Another factor which might be leading to an increase in abortions is the increasing availability and decreasing price of prescription-induced abortions.

In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, both the Biden administration and states controlled by pro-abortion politicians moved quickly to reduce the barriers for making abortion-inducing drugs available by remote prescription.

Increasingly, doctors in states with few abortion restrictions are prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to women in states with restrictive abortion laws, and sending the prescriptions to them. Sometimes those “telehealth” abortions involve minimal contact between the prescribing doctor and the woman who receives the abortion prescription.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports in an “Abortion Trends Before and After Dobbs” analysis that by the second quarter of 2025, 27% of all U.S. abortions were being delivered via “telehealth.” Of those remote abortions, 56% were provided by medical professionals in states with permissive abortion laws to patients in states which significantly restrict abortion.

That helps explain why, despite some states having near total bans on abortion which went into effect after the 2022 Dobbs decision, many of those states show an increase in the number of abortions.

Indeed, most of those states already had few abortion providers and significant legal restrictions on abortion before Dobbs. But as the Biden administration and states with permissive abortion laws sought to preserve abortion availability after the Dobbs decision, it became in some cases easier for people in restrictive states to obtain abortions than it had been previously.

In addition to that greater availability, the Kaiser Foundation analysis also points to the decreasing costs of “remote abortions”. While obtaining an abortion at a brick-and-mortar clinic cost roughly $600 dollars, the cost of remotely provided abortion drugs was significantly lower — the average cost of an abortion inducing prescription via a “virtual clinic” was $239 in 2022, and fell to $150 in 2023.

When things become cheaper, they often become more plentiful. And the economics suggest that the higher cost of abortions before telehealth options may have presented a barrier to some women who instead carried their children to term.

Divided opinions

The fall of the Roe v. Wade precedent, which at the time of Dobbs had been in place longer than reproductive-age women had been alive, served to further polarize an already contentious political and moral issue in the United States.

Gallup, which for decades has maintained polling on abortion, found that in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, the number of Americans describing themselves as “pro-choice” increased by about 5%, while the number of Americans who described themselves as “pro-life” decreased by about 4%.

Since 2022, that gap has narrowed, with the percentage of Americans describing themselves as “pro-choice” falling from 55% to 51%, and the number describing themselves as “pro-life” increasing from 39% to 43%.

But the trend underscores that those who seek to defend the value of unborn life still have significant work to do in the broader culture.

Like many political and cultural issues at this time, this issue seems to have a particular gender division. The increase in the number of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” seems to have been driven especially by women, particularly in the immediate wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision.

The trend towards identifying as “pro-choice” seems to be increasing among American women. American men did not have a significant initial reaction, but there does seem to be some change in recent years.

With the availability of abortion now controlled by the states rather than by federal law, restricting abortion in the U.S. now more obviously depends on changing public sentiment, and especially in the heavily Democratic bastions which are now serving as the export centers for remote abortions.

Three-and-a-half years after the Dobbs decision, the numbers show a landscape in which a single Supreme Court decision has not resolved the issue which continues to be a threat to the life and happiness of Americans and their families.

As Catholics and others gather for the March for Life, they face a different challenge than overturning a Supreme Court decision — the future of abortion in America would seem to depend on achieving much broader kinds of consensus.