Legal abortions per 1000 women in the U.S. 2021, by age

Abortion remains a controversial topic in the United States and has been an exceptionally political topic since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. This ruling has allowed individual states to completely ban the procedure if they choose, which a number of states have since done. In 2021, the year before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the highest rates of legal abortion in the United States were among women aged 20 to 24 years, with around 19.7 abortions per 1,000 women.

How many abortions are there in the United States each year?

In 2021, there were an estimated 626,000 legal abortions in the United States. This was a slight increase from the year before, but in general the number of legal abortions per year in the U.S. has decreased since the late 1990s. The rate of abortion has also decreased significantly. In 1997, the rate of legal abortions per 100 live births was 30.6, but this had dropped to 20.4 per 100 live births by the year 2021. At that time, the states with the highest rates of abortion were Illinois, Florida, and Georgia.

Public opinion on abortion

As of 2023, around 52 percent of U.S. adults considered themselves pro-choice, while 44 percent were pro-life. However, these numbers have fluctuated over the years, with a larger share of people identifying as pro-life just four years earlier. Nevertheless, a poll from 2023 showed that only a small minority of U.S. adults want abortion to be illegal in all cases, with younger people more likely to support the legalization of abortion in any circumstance. Furthermore, surveys have shown that since the overturning of Roe v. Wade U.S. adults have expressed being much more dissatisfied with abortion policy in the country, desiring less strict policy.