Are Draconian Abortion Laws Responsible for Falling Abortion Rates?

Broadly is a women's interest channel coming soon from VICE. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

The abortion rate in America has reached a record low, according to a new "abortion surveillance" report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Does that have anything to do with the raft of anti-abortion legislation that conservatives have passed across the country in recent years? Pro-life activists would certainly like to think so.

In 2011, the CDC counted 730,322 abortions in 49 states and districts, the lowest number recorded in 40 years. That's slightly lower than the number reported by the Guttmacher Institute earlier this year (1.06 million), but both surveys indicate that the US abortion rate has been plummeting for the past few decades.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to determine what, specifically, has caused this decline. According to the CDC, there are myriad potential factors:

As one might expect, pro-life organizations are happy to point out their contribution: "Though the CDC does not seem to put a lot of weight on factors such as pro-life legislation… and does not appear to consider that the lower numbers may reflect changing public attitudes towards abortion," wrote National Right to Life News, "these developments do seem to offer an explanation coherent with the data."

But there's some fairly compelling evidence that pro-life legislation actually didn't have all that significant of an impact on the abortion rate. As Joerg Dreweke argues in the Guttmacher Policy Review, the recent surge of abortion restrictions started in 2011, the last year for which the CDC has data. Since most of the anti-abortion polices passed in 2011 didn't take effect until late that year, it seems odd to credit them for the decline in abortion rates—a trend that, according to the CDC numbers, began around 1990. Moreover, according to the Guttmacher data, the abortion rate has declined in all but six states, even those with no restrictive laws in place.

That's not to say that those laws haven't had any effect. From 2011 to 2013, state legislatures enacted 205 restrictive anti-abortion laws, more than were enacted in the entire previous decade. Particularly popular among the pro-life crowd are laws meant to regulate abortion clinics out of existence through harsh standards and requirements that pro-choice advocates argue are medically unnecessary. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has condemned these measures, commonly known as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, for needlessly singling out abortion providers.

In the South and Midwest, TRAP laws have caused dozens of clinics to close, leaving hundreds of thousands of women more than 200 miles away from their nearest abortion provider. Coupled with waiting-period laws—anti-choice legislation adopted by 35 states that requires women to have an in-person appointment with a doctor, and then wait between one and three days before going back for the procedure—the restrictions have forced many women to make several-hour round trips twice in order to get an abortion.

Of course, the recent spate of restrictions disproportionately affects lower-income women. Studies indicate that such restrictions only have a measurable impact on the abortion rate when they raise the cost of getting an abortion past what some women can bear. Even then, some women will sacrifice paying rent or utilities to afford the procedure.

This troubling trend was particularly evident in Texas, where a TRAP law passed in 2013 shuttered half of clinics in the state and all of the clinics in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest regions in the nation. In the entire state of Texas, the abortion rate fell 13 percent within a year of the law taking effect. In the Rio Grande Valley, the decline was much steeper—the area experienced a startling 21 percent drop in its abortion rate. Not coincidentally, reports have found an increase in women purchasing and using black-market abortion drugs smuggled from Mexico. (Data shows that blocking women's access to safe and legal abortion doesn't decrease the frequency of the procedure, but it does make it more likely that women will resort to unsafe and illegal alternatives.)

It's telling that the same organizations so zealously bent on "protecting unborn life" by hampering women's abortion access are not all that bothered with preventing unwanted pregnancy, which, as the CDC notes, is "the major contributor to abortion." As Dreweke points out in the Guttmacher Policy Review, "U.S. antiabortion groups'… positions on contraception range from outright hostility to, at best, proclaimed neutrality, and their political allies have slashed—or attempted to do so—funding for family planning services."

When pro-life organizations and activists attempt to take credit for the decline in the abortion rate, they are effectively insisting that their insidious tactics are more effective than services that increase women's access to affordable contraceptives and family-planning services. That's demonstrably not true. Women should not be treated as collateral damage in their own pregnancy outcomes, and it feels nearly dystopian to think that there are people in this country who would celebrate coerced birth as a victory.

Follow Callie onTwitter.

Broadly is a women's interest channel coming soon from VICE. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.