Laws and policies on abortion have been changing rapidly across the United States since the US Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion in late June in Dobbs v. Jackson. As a result, some information here may be out of date. Our team is working diligently to update this resource. Thank you for your patience.
For the last four decades, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has partnered with the states to collect aggregate statistics on abortions in the United States. States are not required to submit abortion data to the CDC, but the overwhelming majority do. To collect individual-level data, most state vital statistics agencies have designed a form that abortion providers use for reporting to the state. Typically, the form requires:
- identification of the facility at which the abortion was performed and the physician performing the procedure;
- patient’s demographic characteristics (e.g., age, race, ethnicity, marital status and number of previous live births);
- gestational age; and
- abortion procedure used.
After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the abortion drug mifepristone in 2000, most states adjusted their forms to include questions about medication (nonsurgical) abortion. More recently, states have reconfigured their systems so that reporting is increasingly being done via the Internet.