At least 30,000 new babies who would have otherwise been aborted were instead born in states that enacted some form of abortion restriction following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022, a new study found.
“Our primary analysis indicates that in the first six months of 2023, births rose by an average of 2.3 percent in states enforcing total abortion bans compared to a control group of states where abortion rights remained protected, amounting to approximately 32,000 additional annual births resulting from abortion bans,” a trio of American researchers wrote in a paper released this month.
“As of November 1, 2023, 14 states are enforcing bans on abortion in nearly all circumstances, and 23 percent of U.S. women of reproductive age have experienced an increase in driving distance to the nearest abortion facility, from an average of 43 miles one-way before Dobbs to 330 miles at present,” read the study, published Friday in the Institute of Labor Economics. “This represents the most profound transformation of the landscape of U.S. abortion access in 50 years.”
Much of the study focused on framing the birth spike as “an inequality story,” co-author Caitlin Meyers, an economist at Middleburt, told the New York Times of her findings.
“In 2020, approximately 1 in 5 pregnancies ended in abortion. At the time they seek abortions, 75 percent of patients are low-income, 59 percent have previously given birth, and 55 percent report a recent disruptive life event such as falling behind on the rent or losing a job. Recent evidence suggests that diminished abortion access poses a risk to the health and financial stability of this vulnerable population,” the economists write.
However, the findings were celebrated by Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.
“The insinuation of a lot of coverage of such data points is that it’s a bad thing for there to be more children welcomed in states with better laws than in states that fast-track abortion,” Hawkins told the Times following the report. “It’s a triumph that pro-life policies result in lives saved.”
The findings provide a more detailed picture of the implications of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year, particularly after an October study published by WeCount, a family planning organization, found that abortion rates across the nation had marginally increased in the last year following the ruling.
“States with the largest cumulative increases in the total number of abortions provided by a clinician during the 12-month period after Dobbs,” which the report referred to as “surge states,” included Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, California, and New Mexico.
“Many states where abortion remains legal with few restrictions, especially in the Northeast and Northwest, and especially when not bordering restrictive states, did not experience surges in abortions,” the group wrote in its report released in late October. “We observed greater increases in states close to states with bans, even if those receiving states had abortion restrictions such as mandated in-person counseling and waiting periods.”
Notably, the states that experienced the largest decline in the number of abortions from the pre-Roe baseline were Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Wisconsin. “A total of 14 states experienced a 100% decrease during the study period.”