The rate of murders with abortion pills has rocketed in the USA. A new report claims that total abortions were actually higher in the first months of 2024 than in the months before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which if true would mean efforts to dispense abortion pills remotely are outpacing the number of lives saved by newly enforceable pro-life laws. But pro-lifers have identified reasons to question the findings.
On Wednesday, the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning (SFP) released its #WeCount Report, a study of data on clinician-provided abortions from April 2022 to March 2024. It estimates that broad abortion bans that took effect in 14 states after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling have prevented a total of 208,040 in-person abortions in those states, yet nationwide found an average of 98,990 abortions per month from January through March 2024 compared with a monthly average of 84,000 from April through May 2022, shortly before Dobbs in June.
“This increase in the national totals appears to be driven by the increase in telehealth abortions,” the group says. “Excluding abortions provided under shield laws and by brick-and-mortar clinics (as collection of these data by #WeCount began in July 2023), the national monthly number of telehealth abortions in January-March 2024 is 28% higher than the national monthly number of telehealth abortions in January-March 2023. The national monthly number of in-person abortions in January-March 2024 is about the same (1% lower) than the national monthly number of in-person abortions in January-March 2023.”
“Nationally, telehealth abortions grew from 4% of all abortions in April 2022 to 20% in March 2024,” the report added. “Telehealth represented 21% of all abortions in January 2024, 19% in February, and 20% in March. The number of telehealth abortions provided by all categories of providers (e.g., virtual-only, brick-and-mortar) appear to be increasing.”
Reacting to the news, Catholic University of America professor and Charlotte Lozier Institute scholar Michael New expressed that a degree of skepticism is in order. He noted that SFP “really had no previous experience doing abortion estimates prior to Dobbs,” and many of their state estimates differ significantly from those of the Guttmacher Institute, which while pro-abortion is taken by most on both sides to be the most comprehensive source of abortion data. Guttmacher’s national abortion estimate for 2022 was 951,168, followed by 912,360 in 2023, a decrease of 38,808.