More than a million abortions were provided in the U.S. in 2023. That’s a major finding from a report published Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports access to abortion.
To be precise, researchers estimate there were 1,026,700 abortions in 2023. “That’s the highest number in over a decade, [and] the first time there have been over a million abortions provided in the U.S. formal health care system since 2012,” explains Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist with Guttmacher.
The Guttmacher report also found that medication abortions rose to 63% of all abortions in 2023, up from 53% in 2020. The research was conducted by surveying all in-person and virtual abortion providers in the country and adding up their abortion counts. Guttmacher has been doing this research since 1974.
The findings do not surprise Dr. Anitra Beasley, an OB-GYN and professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who was not involved in the study. She says the trend was suggested by earlier research – and in fact she thinks the true number is even higher than what was measured in the report.
“This is probably an undercount because they are not looking at abortions that happen outside of the formal health care system,” she explains. Uncounted abortions include those that happen when someone gets abortion medication from a friend or over-the-counter at a pharmacy in Mexico, for example.
She says those “self-managed” abortions are certainly happening, but it’s extremely hard to measure them in national counts.
The fact that the number of abortions continues to rise may be counterintuitive given the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Access to abortion has been severely restricted in more than a dozen states since the last time Guttmacher published a comprehensive national count. In 2020, Guttmacher reported that there were 930,160 abortions in the U.S.
