Pew Research Center has analyzed data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention and the Guttmacher Institute regarding the rate of abortion among women in the United States. Notably, the data cited from both organizations precedes the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The last year the CDC reported on the annual national total of abortions was 2022. That year, there were 613,383 abortions in Washington, D.C., and the 46 states that reported data that year, down from 625,978 in those same jurisdictions in 2021 but up from 597,355 in 2020. This information was collected from voluntary reports from states’ central health agencies. Certain states — including California (the most populous state), Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey — have not provided the CDC with statistics on their abortion rates for several decades. In contrast, the Guttmacher Institute analyzes abortion in the U.S. by directly requesting data every three years from every known abortion provider in the country. The last year Guttmacher reported a yearly national total was 2020, tallying 930,160 abortions in the 50 states and D.C., up from 916,460 in 2019 and 885,800 in 2018. These figures from both organizations only include legally-induced abortions.
The annual number of U.S. abortions steadily increased after the Supreme Court legalized the procedure nationwide in 1973, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s at about 1.4 million per year according to the CDC and around 1.6 million per year according to Guttmacher. The CDC estimates that the number of U.S. abortions was 37 percent lower in 2022 than in 1991, while Guttmacher estimates the number was 40 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 1991.
The abortion rate has decreased steadily since 1980. Guttmacher’s data shows there were 14.4 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2020, down from 29.3 per 1,000 in 1981. According to the CDC, there were 11.2 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2022, down from 25 per 1,000 in 1980.
In 2006, the vast majority of abortions (88 percent) were surgical procedures, according to the CDC. By 2020, medical abortions via the administration of mifepristone, which blocks hormones that support a pregnancy, and misoprostol, which causes the uterus to empty, represented 58 percent of all U.S. abortions, according to the CDC, and 53 percent of all abortions, according to Guttmacher.
The number of facilities that provide abortions, either surgically or through the distribution of pills, has declined over the past four decades. According to Guttmacher, there were 2,908 facilities providing abortions in the U.S. in 1982, but only 1,603 facilities in 2020. Clinics are by far the most likely facilities to provide an abortion; although they represented roughly half of all abortion providers in 2020, they were the site of 96 percent of all U.S. abortions that year. Since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the number of clinics has declined from 807 in 2020 to 753 in December 2025.
By age group, women in their 20s accounted for 57 percent of all women who had an abortion in 2022, while those in their 30s accounted for 31 percent, teens accounted for 8.5 percent, and women ages 40 to 44 accounted for 4 percent, according to the CDC. Roughly nine in 10 women who had abortions that year were unmarried, more than half had never had a prior abortion, and nearly 60 percent had previously given birth. When it comes to race and ethnicity, Black women were the most likely group to have an abortion in 2022, representing 39 percent of all abortions, according to the CDC. About 32 percent were non-Hispanic White women, 21 percent were Hispanic women, and 7 percent were women of other races.
In 2022, 93 percent of abortions occurred at or before 13 weeks of pregnancy, while only 1 percent occurred at 21 weeks or more of gestation, according to the CDC. However, this data only includes information from 40 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.
Only 2 percent of U.S. abortions involve some kind of complication for the woman, but most do not require further medical intervention or hospitalization and fatality rates as a result of legal abortion are very low. From 2013 to 2021, the rate of death among women who had a legal induced abortion was 0.46 per 100,000 women, down from 2.09 deaths per 100,000 legal induced abortions from 1973 to 1977.