Abortions Killed 1,129,000 Babies in America in 2025
National | Mia Steupert, M.A. | Sep 16, 2026 | 11:28AM | Washington, DC
Abortions have continued to rise after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. Following this momentous change, several states enacted laws prohibiting abortions from being performed at any point in a woman’s pregnancy (life-at-conception laws) or at a certain gestational age.
In May 2025, Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) published the original version of this paper[1] describing the legal reasons why abortions continued to rise as of June 2024, the breakdown of abortion providers operating in and outside of the formal United States healthcare system,[2] and the most recent and in-depth explanations of abortion totals in America. That paper included estimates of the number of abortions occurring within the formal healthcare system using Guttmacher’s Monthly Provision Study (MAPS) and Society of Family Planning’s (SFP) #WeCount data. It also discussed the number of abortions occurring outside of the formal healthcare system, drawing on peer-reviewed papers and news articles. [3]
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While this year’s version of the paper mentions some new estimates of the number of abortions occurring outside of the formal healthcare system, it primarily focuses on analyzing Guttmacher and #WeCount data for the 2024 and 2025 abortion totals occurring within the formal healthcare system. More specifically, this paper does the following[4]:
- Explains how Guttmacher’s MAPS methodology has changed since CLI’s 2025 paper was published.
- Identifies the changes that have occurred since May 2025 impacting how women obtain abortions, including legal developments and abortion facility closures and openings.
- Provides a synthesized description of Guttmacher and #WeCount data points released since May 2025, as well as analyses of the trends the data presents. These data points include:
- Yearly U.S. abortion totals for 2024 through 2025 and a comparison of states’ abortion totals in 2024 and 2025;
- The number of abortions obtained by women traveling outside of their states of residence from 2023 through 2025 (residency data);
- Abortion totals by mode of provision for 2024 through 2025, with a specific focus on abortions obtained in person at brick-and-mortar facilities and via online-only organizations that mail abortion drugs around the country.[5]
- Analyze the total number of abortions occurring in pro-life states from 2024 through 2025.
In 2024, 1,108,810 abortions occurred within the formal U.S. healthcare system, while 1,129,020 occurred in 2025, according to #WeCount.[6] Abortions increased between 2020 and 2023, between 2023 and 2024, and between 2024 and 2025. These totals and increases are the result of a variety of factors occurring in a complex legal and cultural landscape, and as such cannot be reduced to either political talking points or simplistic causal explanations. However, there are certain factors that are clearly more salient than others. From 2020 to 2023, the national increase in abortions was primarily driven by an increase in abortions obtained by women traveling out of state. The increase in abortions from 2020 to 2024-2025 and the increase from 2024 to 2025 were primarily driven by an increase in women ordering abortion drugs online in their homes and an increased number of residents in states where abortion is still legal obtaining more abortions in those states. The legal changes and changes to the abortion supply chain that primarily drove the increases in 2024 and 2025—traveling out of state and/or ordering abortion drugs online from online-only organizations—doesn’t erase the fact that a majority of abortions post-Dobbs occurred the same way they did pre-Dobbs: in person, in states where abortion is still legal and obtained by residents of those states. Lastly, as abortion totals of one million plus in 2023, 2024, and 2025 show, there is no lack of access to abortion in America.
Reporting Changes
Much has changed regarding abortion reporting since the first version of this paper was written in May 2025. Up until March 2026, SFP’s #WeCount project was the only reporting organization that estimated abortions occurring via shield laws (laws in pro-abortion states that protect abortionists who ship abortion drugs into pro-life states or perform abortions on non-resident women) in states with life-at-conception laws. Guttmacher’s MAPS previously captured abortions occurring in states, via shield laws, with six-or-12-week restrictions or restrictions on mail-order abortions. However, MAPS did not capture mail-order abortion drugs being mailed to states with life-at-conception laws like Alabama until March 2026. In March 2026, Guttmacher released its abortion totals for all of 2025, both for individual states and the country as a whole. The March 2026 data uploaded by Guttmacher included estimates for every state with a life-at-conception law beginning from July 2023, the point in time when #WeCount started tracking such data.[7]
As of August 2026, both Guttmacher and #WeCount’s estimates capture abortions[8]:
- Occurring in person (at brick-and-mortar facilities) in all states where abortions (both surgical and drug-induced) are legal throughout a woman’s pregnancy or up until a certain gestational age;
- Occurring via online-only organizations in all states where such abortions are legal and in all states where they are prohibited by state law (either by gestational limits and/or specific mail-order abortion prohibitions) but are performed anyway via pro-abortion states’ shield laws.[9]
Where Guttmacher and #WeCount’s data still differ is in how they break down the states’ abortion estimates. Guttmacher’s focus on residency data allows researchers to see how many abortions within a state were obtained by residents versus nonresidents, as well as how many women traveled out of state to obtain abortions. #WeCount, on the other hand, breaks down state totals by type of provision: in-person (at brick-and-mortar facilities) versus online-only organizations or hybrid brick-and-mortar centers.
The reason why the public and researchers must rely on private, pro-abortion organizations’ reporting of abortion totals is because official reporting by states is so limited. Of the 51 possible reporting areas (50 states and D.C.), only 36 report brick-and-mortar abortions occurring within their state. [10] Only seven state health departments claim to track the number of abortion drugs mailed into the state from abortionists in other states and include those abortions in their public facing abortion reports.[11] Finally, of the 32 states and D.C. where abortionists are allowed to ship abortion drugs within the state, seven claim they include such abortions in their published totals, yet two of those states (Colorado and New Mexico) don’t publicly report abortion data.[12]
While the Guttmacher and #WeCount reporting models are certainly not without flaws, they are the only two available and comprehensive sources that include abortion estimates for all 50 states and D.C. and capture the relative totality of abortions occurring within the formal U.S. healthcare system. The chief flaw in both Guttmacher’s and #WeCount’s data is that it is not reproducible, as gold-standard social science data should be, because the two organizations do not publish facility-level abortion totals.[13]
Changes to Where and How Women Access Abortion
As described in the original version of this paper, three regulatory and legal changes in the past several years have caused abortion totals to not only rise from pre-Dobbs levels but continue to rise year after year after the Dobbs decision.[14] Those three factors are:
- The initial 2020 removal of the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion drug mifepristone. This initial removal was made official in December 2021 and the requirement was removed from the regulatory rulebooks in January 2023. This change allowed for online access to abortion drugs within the formal healthcare system via the mail.[15]
- The 2022 Dobbs decision ushered in the enactment of laws that allowed pro-life states to prohibit abortion at differing points in a woman’s pregnancy (or altogether). These legal changes initiated subsequent responses by pro-abortion states that codified the “right” to an abortion in their state constitutions or changed their state laws to allow abortion later in pregnancy.[16]
- Shield laws in eight states, mainly passed in 2022-2024, that specifically shield abortionists who mail abortion drugs into pro-life states from any legal ramifications, and the shield laws in an additional 14 states that shield abortionists who perform abortions in their states of residence and/or licensure on both women from their own states and women who travel from pro-life states.[17]
While these factors continue to contribute to the rise in the number of abortions in the United States, it is also important to describe new developments that are contributing to this rise and changing how women obtain abortions in America. Below, developments surrounding the opening and closing of brick-and-mortar abortion centers, the opening of more online-only organizations, and legal changes since May 2025 will be discussed.[18]
The Opening and Closing of Brick-and-Mortar Abortion Centers in Several States
The passage of Public Law 119-21, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), on July 4, 2025, thrust the topic of brick-and-mortar abortion centers into a national conversation increasingly dominated by discussions of the rise in telehealth abortions.[19] The OBBBA included a section (Sec. 71113) prohibiting organizations from receiving federal funds if they were tax-exempt, an essential community provider primarily focused on providing family planning services, received over $800,000 in Medicaid funding from the federal and state governments in fiscal year 2023, and performed abortions. This meant that Planned Parenthood affiliates and the health centers they governed stopped receiving federal funds until this provision expired on July 4, 2026.[20] Prior to the OBBBA going into effect on July 4, 2025, 17 abortion-performing Planned Parenthood locations closed from January 1, 2025, to July 4, 2025, as well as eight after the OBBBA went into effect (through the end of 2025). In 2025, 11 independent abortion centers closed as well for reasons independent of the OBBBA, as these centers were not implicated in the OBBBA’s restrictions. In 2026, as of July 31, seven abortion-performing Planned Parenthood centers have closed, while six independent abortion centers and/or abortion-performing hospitals/doctors’ offices closed, as well.
Despite widespread claims that access to abortion is shrinking, unfortunately, there are a plethora of brick-and-mortar abortion centers still in operation as of July 31, 2026—827 to be exact.[21] This is not to say that there wasn’t a higher number of brick-and-mortar abortion centers closing versus opening from 2024 to 2026. There were 39 more closures of brick-and-mortar abortion centers from 2024 to July 31, 2026, than there were openings of brick-and-mortar abortion centers. However, this doesn’t negate the fact that for a legal landscape that the abortion industry often decries as too restrictive, abortion centers are still opening in states where abortion is legal and largely unregulated.[22] To see the closures and openings of brick-and-mortar abortion centers by state, see Table 3 below.[23]
