Half of the pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. From 1973 to 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions were performed in America. Forty-five percent of all abortions since 1973 have been for women who were not married at the time of the procedure.
According to Alabama’s Department of Public Health, there were 9,076 abortions performed in the state in 2012, or about one abortion for every 6.4 births. Fourteen percent of all abortions in Alabama were performed on teenagers.
In 2011 — the most recent year for which national figures are available — Alabama ranked 33rd in the nation in abortion. The state’s abortion rate (10 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44) was lower than the rates of Florida (23.7), Georgia (16.8), and Tennessee (13.1), but higher than that of Mississippi (3.7).
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Nationally, an estimated 1.06 million abortions were performed in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based organization that gathers voluntary reports from abortion providers. The numbers of abortions performed in Alabama from 1986 to 1991 are estimates because it was not until 1992 that the state law required full reporting from the providers of abortion services.
More than 533,000 abortions have been performed in the state since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. This number is equal to almost half the population of the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Statistical Area (1,140,300 in 2013).
Dr. John R. Hill is a senior research analyst for the Alabama Policy Institute.
