Decline in the United States abortion rate has been witnessed by more than one-third, said the federal officials.
Advertisement
There were, however, some substantial racial differences, with a higher birth rate in 2010 among Hispanic women and a higher abortion rate among non-Hispanic black women. As such, the abortion rate in 2010 was also calculated at 17.7 per 1,000.
Between 1990 and 2010, a rise has been witnessed in pregnancy rates among women aged 30 and above. In 2012, the most recent year CDC data is available, the abortion rate was 13.2 per 1,000 women. Meanwhile, pregnancy rates are rising for women 30 and older, indicating that more women appear to want to wait to start families.
That meant that the rate of pregnancies and hence abortions was also declining.
“Much has been written about the birth rate, and much about the abortion rate, but a lot are shown separately”, Sally Curtin, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics and one of the study’s authors, told Time.
There were 6.155 million pregnancies in 2010 – the lowest number since 1986. Also, abortion rate also decreased in 2010, with 17.7 of the procedures performed per 1,000 women of childbearing age, that figure was as high as 29.4 abortions per 1,000 women in 1980. The largest percent decline was seen among those teens who are aged 14 and below at 67 percent. The report’s co-author Kathryn Kost, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, said that there are many factors that have led to the reduction in the abortion rate including increased use of highly effective birth controls.
“Since we’ve been compiling these numbers, the pregnancy rate was the lowest on record”, Curtin said. Respectively, the two subsets presented a 12 and 27 percent decline since 1990.
The National Vital Statistics System provided the data on birth.
The new data follows multiple studies showing that the overall number of pregnancies has dropped.
There were fluctuation in fetal loss rates, 3% lower in 2010 than in 1990.
There are three possible outcomes of pregnancy: live birth, abortion, or fetal loss through stillbirth or miscarriage.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, the report also showed that the pregnancy rate was also seen to be at a steady decline in 2010.
