In this Kentucky gubernatorial election year, the Kentucky Republican Party has framed abortion as one of the most important election issues, even after the GOP-dominated General Assembly quickly passed four bills dealing with abortion in 2019:
- House Bill 5 banned abortions on the basis of sex, race or perceived disability.
- House Bill 148 decreed that if Roe vs. Wade is overturned, abortion will be banned in Kentucky.
- Senate Bill 9 banned abortions any time after a fetal heartbeat is detected.
- Senate Bill 50 required that doctors present information to patients about how medication induced abortions can be reversed.
Governor Matt Bevin has prominently featured these bills via a video ad showing the ceremonial signing of these bills on the governor’s official Facebook site. He has also made it clear that abortion is one of the primary planks of his campaign with social media posts such as the following:
Kentuckians deeply value the sanctity of human life and our administration will CONTINUE to defend the inalienable rights of unborn children at every opportunity!
— Governor Matt Bevin (2015-2019) (@GovMattBevin) September 10, 2019
So what’s actually happening with abortion in the U.S. and in Kentucky?
With these campaign posts in mind, I took a careful read through the Guttmacher Institute’s 2019 report on trends in abortion rates and access to abortions across the country. Every three years the Institute does a survey of health care providers that do legal abortions in the United States. The survey documents trends in abortion rates and abortion access. From this survey as well as public records, the Institute compiles information about abortion rates by state and summarizes the availability of abortion services across the country. The 2019 report covers the period from 2014-2017.
Abortions per 1,000 women: The overall number of abortions overall declined by 8% between 2014 and 2017 from 14.6 abortions per 1000 women to 13.5 in 2017. The declines occurred in all regions of the nation, with declines of 6% in the Northeast, 4% in the Midwest, 6% in the South and 14% in the West.
Abortions per 100 pregnancies: Interestingly, however, the abortion rate per 100 pregnancies only declined by a little over 2%. The discrepancy indicates that much of the decline in the abortion rate came from fewer overall pregnancies, mostly likely due to increased contraceptive use. This four-year trend mirrors a larger trend in abortion rates that has been in progress for the last two decades: the number of abortions was 37% lower in 2017 than it was in 2001.
Kentucky abortion numbers: The abortion figures for the state of Kentucky mirrored national trends.
- During the period 2014-2017, the number of abortions in KY declined 9% from 3530 to 3200.
- By 2017, Kentucky had the third lowest abortion rate in the nation at 3.8 per 1000 women between the ages of 15-44. Only the states of Wyoming and South Dakota had lower abortion rates.
- Kentucky’s abortion rate in 2017 was only 28% of the national average (3.8 vs. 13.5 per 1,000 women).
Abortion availability: The Guttmacher report also highlighted trends in abortion availability over the same 4 year period. The number of abortion providers declined in 19 states, remained the same in 15 states, and increased in 17 others. (Numbers include the District of Columbia.)
The report also noted that 196 new laws adding restrictions were enacted during the 4 years covered by the report, including 3 in Kentucky and 20 in Indiana. The report also noted that many of these restrictions were not in force because of court injunctions or because the underlying law had been overturned as unconstitutional.
The paradox of abortion availability vs abortion rates: One of the more interesting patterns in the report was that the 10 states that had the greatest increases in access to abortion showed larger declines in abortion rates (-13%) than the 10 states that had the greatest declines in abortion access (-7%).
- For instance, the state of Maine quadrupled the number of abortion providers from 4 to 16, but the number of abortions still dropped by 7%.
- Likewise, Delaware saw the greatest overall decline in abortions (-37%), even though its abortion provider base expanded from 3 to 4.
- In contrast, the state of Wisconsin saw a 6% increase in abortion rates even though its number of abortion providers dropped from four to three.
Conclusions about abortion policy and abortion politics
Several general conclusions can be drawn from the data:
- The trend of declining abortion rates is occurring across the nation, and has been in progress for two decades, not just recently.
- This trend is occurring despite significant state differences in abortion policy and access to abortion.
- Looking at the data, Kentucky would be one of the last states where one would expect abortion to be a prominent issue.
- The fact that abortion is played up as one of the top issues in the current gubernatorial campaign says much more about the political needs of one political party than it does about the facts.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Looking at the data for abortions in Kentucky, the fact that abortion is played up as one of the top issues in the current gubernatorial campaign says much more about the political needs of one political party than it does about the facts.” quote=”Looking at the data for abortions in Kentucky, the fact that abortion is played up as one of the top issues in the current gubernatorial campaign says much more about the political needs of one political party than it does about the facts.”]
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