The U.S. abortion rate declined to a historic low in 2014, and evidence suggests the reason is something else Republicans oppose: access to reliable contraception.
Guttmacher gathered data on abortions performed between 2011 and 2014, and found that abortion rates continued their steady downward trend before reaching historic recorded lows in 2014. The overall rate, 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women, is lower than it was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided and when the abortion rate was 16.3 per 1,000 women.
What’s more, Guttmacher found, the raw recorded number of abortions fell below 1 million for the first time since the mid-1970s. There were 1.06 million recorded abortions in 2011, and by 2014 that number was 926,200.
The abortion ratio — the proportion of abortions to live births — is also down to historic lows. In 1995, the abortion ratio was about 26 abortions for every 100 live births; in 2014, it was 18.8.
Republicans have been running around making it hard for women to access abortions, but by defunding Planned Parenthood and opposing the inclusion of contraception in the Affordable Care Act, they’ve acted against the thing that made women less likely to seek abortions to begin with. The rate of unintended pregnancies dropped, and one key reason for that was an increase in the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs and implants.
In other words, if you want to make abortion less common, Democratic policies are the way to go.