National Right to Life Releases Ninth Annual Report

January 31, 2022

The State of Abortion in the United States

WASHINGTON – The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) today released The State of Abortion in the United States, 2022. In the ninth annual edition of this report, the nation’s oldest and largest pro-life organization summarizes key legislative developments on the state and federal level, and analyzes the data on the annual number of abortions in the United States.

This year’s report also takes a detailed look at the history of the Hyde Amendment, which has prevented federal funding of elective abortion in Medicaid since 1976. In addition, it contains an in-depth look at accelerating efforts to resurrect by unconstitutional means the long-expired Equal Rights Amendment, and explains the sweeping impact that the ERA could have on abortion law (an impact once denied but now proclaimed by prominent pro-abortion advocates).

Additionally, the report looks at the national landscape of state-level abortion laws in a post-Roe society

“Earlier this month, we commemorated the deaths of more than 63 million unborn children that resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “However, as this year’s State of Abortion report shows, the right-to-life movement has remained undeterred and continues to make advances. Through our determination to protect mothers and their children, we continue to see evidence that our efforts to educate our nation about the unborn child’s humanity, and our efforts to enact protective pro-life legislation, are having a tremendous impact in moving our nation away from Roe and Doe’s deadly legacy.”

Key highlights from the report include:

Abortion data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the end of last year show that abortions in recent years have increased slightly (driven much in part to the expansion of chemical abortion), but the annual number of abortions remain far from their historic peak of 1.6 million. Based on data from the CDC and the Guttmacher Institute, National Right to Life now estimates that 63,459,781 abortions have been performed in the United States since 1973.

The CDC continues to show that chemical abortions (or as it puts them, “medical” abortions) constitute a large percentage of abortions – 43.7% in their figures for 2019.

State legislatures continue to be successful in enacting pro-life legislation that extends protections to unborn children and helps their mothers. These laws include protections for pain-capable unborn children, laws banning dismemberment abortions, and efforts to steer state funding away from organizations that perform abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.

The report is available from the National Right to Life Communications Department here: http://www.nrlc.org/uploads/communications/stateofabortion2022.pdf

National Right to Life experts, including President Carol Tobias; Director of Education and Research Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D.; Legislative Director Jennifer Popik, J.D.; and (on the Equal Rights Amendment) Senior Policy Advisor Douglas D. Johnson, are available to provide further information about the report and its insights. To arrange an interview, call the NRLC Communications Department at (202) 626-8825 or mailto:mediarelations@nrlc.org.