Yet Another Damn Good Reason to Keep Birth Control Free

The United States abortion rate has fallen to the lowest level recorded since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. The decline happened during a time that saw both unprecedented access to birth control and attacks on reproductive rights, but a new analysis suggests that it's the former, not the latter, that was responsible.

In the study, researchers from the Guttmacher Institute surveyed all known abortion providers on how many terminations they provided and also assessed changes in the number of facilities in individual states. (It's the reproductive health research and policy group's 17th such "census.") In states where the number of clinics greatly declined, they also looked at abortion restrictions that had been introduced.

After crunching the numbers, they determined there were 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2014, marking a 14 percent decline from 2011. Abortion rates fell in all but six states and the District of Columbia, with the sharpest declines in the West and the South (16 percent each) and smaller decreases in the Northeast (11 percent) and the Midwest (9 percent).

But changes in abortion rates didn't directly correlate with state restrictions on abortion, or the number of clinics. As Guttmacher noted in a release: "The number of clinics in the Midwest declined 22 percent during the study period, while the abortion rate in that region declined 9 percent. But in the Northeast, the number of clinics increased 14 percent and the abortion rate declined 11 percent."

This study didn't investigate the reasons why the abortion rate is falling, but senior policy communications manager Joerg Dreweke took a closer look at the factors involved in an accompanying analysis. While the data suggest that both state laws and increased access to birth control affected the abortion rate, 62 percent of the decline in the number of abortions happened in the 28 states (and Washington DC) where there wasn't any new major abortion legislation in effect during the study period.

Even in the 22 states where there were restrictions, Dreweke doesn't believe that anti-choice laws can explain all of the drop. That's because there wasn't a comparable increase in births between 2011 and 2014 to offset the decline in abortions. The number of births during that period increased by only about 35,000 while abortions fell by about 132,000. It's more likely that fewer people were getting pregnant to begin with, an idea that's been supported by the country's steadily declining birth rates as well as previous research on abortion. For example, the abortion decline during the 2008 to 2011 period was largely driven by decreases in unintended pregnancy, which is most plausibly explained by increased birth control use. And that was before the Affordable Care Act required insurers to cover all FDA-approved methods of prescription birth control with no copay starting in 2013. The ACA covers pricey (and super effective) IUDs and implants, which twice as many women used in 2013 as they did in 2010.

Sadly, no-cost birth control coverage is expected to be nixed under a Trump Administration and certain states are going hard on a pro-life agenda. More and more data suggest that such anti-choice policies don't decrease the abortion rate, but this assumes that women in Trump's America would be able to access abortion at all.