By Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, Director of Education & Research
It comes up every election, just as people are going to the polls. Some story or meme or rumor hits the pro-life community with the claim that abortions go down under Democrat administrations but go up when Republicans take the White House.
The clear aim of these propaganda pieces is to convince pro-lifers that if they really want to reduce abortions in this country, they should vote for the pro-abortion Democrats.
We’re hearing those rumors again. Don’t fall for this malarkey.
Bottom line: If you look carefully at the data charts and the political timelines, what you see is that it usually takes years for new policies to take effect. Abortions don’t drop the day a pro-life Republican president takes office, nor do they suddenly increase when a pro-abortion Democrat administration takes over.
If you really do want to save the lives of unborn children, don’t vote for candidates who will support abortion on demand, for any reason, throughout (and beyond) pregnancy, fund the abortion industry, and try to expand the market for abortion pills.
Pro-abortion politicians like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz are already responsible for shocking increases in abortion that have occurred since Roe fell and will certainly lead to future increases if returned to office.
A myth based on misinterpreted data
As we said, we’ve heard this foolishness before. It comes from a too facile reading of abortion statistics, reported and repeated without any context.
Some just pull up charts of abortion numbers and make the observation that there were fewer abortions when Clinton or Obama left office than when they started. Voila! Proof that their policies reduced abortions?
No.
Then they note how that there were more abortions in the year Trump left office than when he entered the White House. Did Trump’s pro-life policies increase abortions?
Not at all. Even if the numbers are right (there is some question here), this is a simplistic, erroneous reading of the data that does not reflect the social and political reality on the ground.
In truth, if you look at the available data, previously rising abortions stabilized under Reagan and then fell under his successor Bush, and then again under George W. Bush. They continued dropping under Clinton and Obama, but at a lower rate as their terms progressed.
There was an increase under Trump, but this was part of a trend upward that started in Obama’s last years in office. Who deserves the credit for that?
It is policies and court appointments that matter in the long run
Abortions skyrocketed after the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 1973. Congress passed the Hyde amendment in 1976, barring the use of federal funds to pay for elective abortions. However, the impact was not felt until the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect in 1980.
That’s the first time we began to see the abortion numbers impacted.
It was also about this time that the first parental involvement laws were passed, giving parents a chance to at least be informed of their minor teen’s abortion decision.
So it was in the early 1980s that the eruption of abortions that occurred after Roe plateaued and stabilized and finally began to drop after 1990.
Though there were a few pro-life Democrats in those days, the laws and policies that drove this drop were almost entirely Republican initiatives.
Informed consent laws passed in many states during the first Bush administration and contributed to significant decreases in the 1990s.
A proposal to ban Partial-Birth Abortion that occurred during the Clinton administration was vetoed by the White House, but it dominated the political conversation and obviously made many women reconsider their “choices.” Abortion dropped again.
The decline accelerated once George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The Supreme Court struck down a similar state law in 2000, but a newly reconstituted court upheld a revised federal law in 2007.
Once again, these trends continued but slowed under Democrat administrations, who instead took actions to boost the abortion industry.
Obama gives Trump a hard time
The downward trend began slowing once Obama took office, largely due to something his Democrat predecessor did years earlier: Bill Clinton shepherded mifepristone through the regulatory process in the 1990s and saw the abortion pill approved in 2000.
It was slow to take off at first, owing to distribution restrictions and negative publicity about patient deaths and complications. But the number steadily grew from about 16.4% in 2008– the year Obama was first elected–to nearly four out of ten (39.4%) in 2017, the year he left office.
This was the legacy that Obama left his successor.
It should also be noted that in 2016, Obama’s last full year, his FDA cut regulations on mifepristone distribution. The agency dropped two of three required visits, allowed the pill to be used by women later in gestations, and expanded the prescriber pool to include nurses, physician assistants, and other lower level “healthcare providers.”
Given these changes (and other policies) Obama put in place, it was no real surprise that chemical abortions accounted for more than half (53%) of all abortions in the U.S. by 2021, the year Trump left office.
Trump impacts the future
That trend – increases in both chemical and abortions in general – has continued in recent years, interrupted, briefly, by one thing – the overturn of Roe in 2022. And that was clearly Trump’s doing.
People assumed that Roe was an edifice that would stand forever. That was until Donald Trump came along and made three appointments to the Supreme Court – Neal Gorsuch in 2017, Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020.
The opportunity to reconsider Roe did not come along during Trump’s administration, but those appointments bore fruit in June of 2022. By a 5-3-1 vote the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health to overturn Roe.
The Biden administration argued against it and has since fought to reverse it or blunt its impact. Yet Dobbs did lead to protections of some form for unborn children going into place in 21 states and immediate drops in abortion in those states when they went into force.
Thanks to the abortion industry and their allies in the White House and many state houses, a lot of women simply traveled to other states and got abortions, often for free, keeping national numbers from sustaining any permanent drop.
Actions by the Biden-Harris administration further reducing federal limits on abortions pills. Now that drugs could be picked up at drug stores or mailed to women’s homes, even in states where abortion was now illegal, it enabled the abortion industry the chance to accelerate over the obstacle of Dobbs.
Bottom Line for the Babies
Abortions have gone up and come down under both Republican and Democrat administrations. But the policies consistently driving these increases have come from the Democrats, intent on seeing their pro-abortion agenda triumph.
Policies pushed by Republican administration are the only reason that abortions aren’t where they were 35 years ago, where they hovered between 1.5 and 1.6 million a year.
We are now headed in that direction again. Whether we return to those dark days is largely up to voters in this fall’s election.