A survey released Tuesday finds that the rate of abortions in the US has declined since the Supreme Court legalized its procedure in 1973. Statistic date from the Guttmacher Institute says that the abortion rate in 2014 was 14.6 abortions per 1000 women ages 15 to 44. In 1973 the rate of abortion was 16.3.
The figure 14.6 during 2014 also declined compared to the rate during 2011. The number of abortions in 2011 was 1.06 million while there are 926, 200 during 2014. The survey will be published three days before Donald Trump an avowed abortion opponent, inaugurated the nation's 45th president.
Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, said that better birth control is a key to dropping number of abortions. The primary element that contributed to the decline of abortion numbers is that the improved usage of contraceptives, that prevents unwanted pregnancies. She added that this is a good news, this means that more women are able to access the resources they need to plan their families and prevent unintended pregnancies.
For abortion opponents, the numbers indicated a different benchmark. Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, said that we are still far from restoring the full legal and moral respect for the unborn. However, getting below one million abortions for the first time since 1975 is a milestone.
Aside from contraceptives and laws limiting abortion access, O'Bannon and his group believe that Americans may have come to their senses that abortion is not a real solution for mothers, for their babies, or for society in general. According to the USA Today, Denovan notes that an earlier institute study found 75 percent of abortion patients in 2014 were low-income.
According to the CNN, there could be a third element that affects the rates. The findings may be correlated with the number of abortion clinics. The number of clinics in the Midwest declined 22 percent during the study period while the rate of abortion in the region declined to nine percent. However, in the North West clinics increased 14 percent and the abortion rate declined to 11 percent between 2011 to 2014. Whatever could be the reason of the dramatically dropping rate of abortion in the US it seems to be a good news.
