Overturning Roe v. Wade Increased Abortions? Rebutted

Lots of people claim that after Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion rates increased in the U.S., and some go so far as to say the pro-life movement caused this increase.

So in today’s episode, we will terminate this product of misconception and show why pro-lifers must always continue to fight for the legal protection of all human beings.

First, let’s take a look at what people are saying when they make this claim.

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“Since we overturned Roe v. Wade, which is the only thing he’s ever done legislatively on the topic of abortion, abortions have only gone up. You have not prevented the deaths of more innocent babies.”

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“Did you know that the abortion rate has only gone up since the end of Roe v. Wade? It’s the four-year anniversary today of the Supreme Court overturning Roe. In those four years, the abortion rate has not gone down by one single percent. It has only gone up.”

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“Since Dobbs has been overturned, there actually has been an increase in abortion. So these bans don’t even work.”

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“I’ll be the first one to say it. I’m really tired of all the abortion talk. I’m really tired of it.

“Haven’t abortions gone up? They overturned Roe v. Wade, and now there’s more abortion than there was before. And it seems more accessible than ever.

“So I’m very cynical about that whole—I’m very cynical. The people that run the anti-abortion thing, it’s like, it’s all women, they’re all feminists, and it’s just something that somebody needs to say.”

Right off the bat, I’m skeptical of this argument.

After Roe was overturned through Dobbs v. Jackson, nearly half of U.S. states enacted some kind of abortion ban or restriction.

Because abortion was banned where I live, our family no longer goes and prays at abortion facilities because they don’t exist. Instead, the closest we’re able to do that is when we go on vacation in a state where abortion is still legal, like California, and we pray at the abortion facilities there.

I understand the numbers only going down slightly or maybe flatlining.

But why would banning abortion cause abortion rates to increase?

For example, I understand how banning so-called “assault rifles,” or certain scary-looking semi-automatic rifles, would cause sales of these weapons to increase.

People who are afraid of losing access to these weapons might buy them when they ordinarily would not have, just in case they aren’t able to get one of these guns in the future.

But abortion doesn’t work like that.

No woman who is not pregnant thinks to herself, “Oh wow, I might not be able to get an abortion in the future. Well, I’d better go get pregnant and then get an abortion now while I still can.”

If someone was going to give birth to their child anyway, outlawing abortion isn’t suddenly going to make them change their mind and think they need to get an abortion just in case.

So, as I said, I’m skeptical of this argument because it doesn’t propose a mechanism to explain how banning abortion leads to more abortions.

Now, a critic might say they aren’t claiming abortion bans increase abortion. They’re just saying the pro-life movement failed because, for whatever reason, abortion rates went up even though abortion was restricted or banned in several places.

But that fact by itself doesn’t mean pro-lifers failed, because their actions could have kept abortion rates from going up even higher than they ordinarily would have by tackling one cause of abortion—its legality—even though another cause still made the rates increase.

And so, when we look at this argument, it’s that third cause I suspect we’re going to be looking for.

But first, let’s talk about abortion statistics and how they can be misused.

Comparing Abortion Statistics

The two biggest groups that tabulate national abortion statistics for the U.S. are the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, and the Guttmacher Institute, named after Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher, though after 2007 it was no longer officially affiliated with the organization.

CDC numbers for abortion are consistently lower than Guttmacher numbers because California does not report the number of abortions in its state to the Centers for Disease Control.

The Guttmacher Institute, in contrast, sends surveys to abortion providers in every state, and so it consistently has larger, more accurate numbers in this respect.

I’ve heard some people claim abortion rates skyrocketed after Roe v. Wade was overturned, going from around 600,000 in 2020 to over one million in 2023.

Here’s a woman on TikTok making an even grander claim:

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“How much more blood needs to be on the hands of anti-abortion activists? Four years ago today, Donald Trump’s hand-picked activist Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and now there are nearly twice as many abortions in the United States as there were before the Dobbs decision.”

The only way you could get that conclusion is if you confuse the CDC numbers and the Guttmacher numbers.

You can see this in a chart where, prior to Dobbs, the CDC claimed there were around 600,000 abortions committed in the U.S. each year, while the most recent Guttmacher numbers place that at around 1.1 million.

That would be almost double the CDC numbers.

So it’s absurd to claim pro-lifers, by overturning Roe, singlehandedly doubled abortion because you’re using the wrong counting metrics.

But other people use more sober numbers to make the claim that abortions merely increased after Roe, even if they didn’t dramatically increase.

Guttmacher, for example, claims there were around 900,000 abortions right before the pandemic but now says there are about 1.1 million annually.

Here’s Michelle Lujan Grisham being asked about this on Meet the Press:

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“This week marks two years since Roe v. Wade was struck down. And yet in 2023, America had the highest abortion number and abortion rate in over a decade. Why do you think there are more abortions happening at a time when there is decreased access?”

“Well, I think there are more abortions happening because more women are at risk, which means they can’t get into a provider. They can’t get prenatal care. You’ve got providers who are worried about prosecutions and any number of other issues that interfere with their ability to provide care—less access to contraceptives, less information about public health, less ability to get to your primary care physician.”

But that doesn’t make sense, because banning abortion doesn’t affect the provision of contraception or seeing your regular doctor who doesn’t provide abortions.

So it must be something else.

And in order to answer this question, we need to know how abortions are performed in different parts of pregnancy.

Fair warning: this is disturbing.

But abortion is disturbing.

How Abortions Are Performed

Before an unborn child is nine weeks old, two-thirds to three-quarters of abortions are performed with medication like mifepristone and misoprostol that essentially cause the child to be miscarried and expelled from his mother’s womb, leading to his or her death.

But in a quarter to a third of cases, the child is removed from his mother’s womb through a suction device that dismembers the child as he or she is removed.

Up to about nine weeks accounts for about 78% of all abortions.

But remember, if there are over a million abortions annually in the U.S., that means over 200,000 occur after this point, where other methods like dilation and evacuation must be used because the child is too large to fit through a suction tube.

In the 2007 case Gonzales v. Carhart, the U.S. Supreme Court described these abortion procedures this way:

“The doctor, often guided by ultrasound, inserts grasping forceps through the woman’s cervix and into the uterus to grab the fetus. The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix.

“The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. The process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed.”

The abortionist Warren Hern writes in his medical textbook Abortion Practice:

“A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus.”

In some cases, like after the child is 21 weeks old, he or she is too large to be killed in this way, and so the child is essentially poisoned and then delivered as a stillbirth.

There is no need to do this for the woman’s life or health, since an emergency C-section is a faster way to remove the child and give him at least a chance to live.

Instead, abortions at this stage require the vagina to be slowly dilated, like preparation for birth, before the child is killed and his or her body is removed.

Once again, the Supreme Court described the procedure this way:

“Sometimes the abortion provider ends the fetus’s life without dismembering him, though this method is rare.

“Some doctors, especially later in the second trimester, may kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation. They inject digoxin or potassium chloride into the fetus, the umbilical cord, or the amniotic fluid.

“Fetal demise may cause contractions and make greater dilation possible. Once dead, moreover, the fetus’s body will soften, and its removal will be easier.”

Abortions after 21 weeks only account for 1% of all abortions.

But that’s still over 10,000 children killed by abortion at this particularly late and gruesome stage.

To put this into perspective, about 15,000 people are murdered by guns in the U.S. each year.

So if there is an epidemic of gun violence in this country, then there is a pandemic of late-term abortion violence.

The Rise of Chemical Abortion

We need to distinguish medical, or chemical, abortions—which I think is a more fitting term—that make up most early abortions from surgical abortions.

According to Guttmacher, surgical, or what they call “procedural,” abortions and chemical abortions were once about half and half, with a slight edge to chemical abortions.

But by 2023, these chemical abortions, where only a pill was needed and not a doctor’s office, accounted for 64% of all abortions.

In March of 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, the FDA paused the in-person dispensing requirement for chemical abortion pills.

And on December 16, 2021, the FDA made this change permanent, allowing certified clinicians to prescribe mifepristone via telehealth and send the medication by mail or through certified pharmacies.

The Society of Family Planning compared 2023 quarterly reports from abortion providers in their survey to those from 2025 and saw in-person abortions go down by 30,000 while telehealth-prescribed chemical abortions went up by 70,000.

Also, if you look at abortion numbers from right before Dobbs until today, you could reach the mistaken conclusion that Dobbs caused the numbers to go up.

But this is a classic example of a logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc, or “after this, therefore because of this.”

It’s like saying the sun rises because the rooster crows merely because the sun rises after the rooster crows.

Or, to give a historical example, St. Augustine refuted this fallacy in his book The City of God when pagans said Christians caused the fall of Rome.

Augustine pointed out that cities like Troy were destroyed even when they served pagan gods and that social decay happens throughout history.

He writes:

“If the human race had received Christianity before the Punic Wars, and if the same desolating calamities which these wars brought upon Europe and Africa had followed the introduction of Christianity, there is no one of those who now accuse us who would not have attributed them to our religion.”

You can find the “after this, therefore because of this” fallacy in many articles about abortion bans.

One example has the headline, “A Dramatic Rise in Pregnant Women Dying in Texas After Abortion Ban,” which could make you think the abortion ban caused these women to die at higher rates.

But when you scroll down, the article’s chart summary of the data shows maternal mortality increased from 2019 until 2021, before Texas’s abortion ban went into effect the next year in 2022.

And during that time, maternal mortality decreased after the ban was in place.

What likely happened was that maternal mortality increased after 2020 because of COVID infections, not laws banning abortion.

Likewise, saying that Dobbs caused abortion numbers to increase is fallacious because abortion rates were already increasing before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

The main factor seems to be increased access to telehealth medicine after the pandemic that allowed chemical abortions to become more widespread.

This news reporter acknowledges that and then says:

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“That brings us to number four. Abortion opponents want the Trump administration to do more to crack down on abortion pills.

“I’m not saying the Trump administration has done nothing, but I’m saying on the number one issue of abortion in America today, which is chemical abortion pill policy, it’s been neglected.

“This is why states like Louisiana are fighting this in court. They’re arguing that being able to send these pills by mail into their states completely undermines their abortion ban.

“They want the FDA to restrict once again and go back to when patients had to get it in person.”

Do All Reported Chemical Abortions Actually Occur?

We also don’t know if all these chemical abortions were actual abortions that took place, or just people stockpiling abortion pills because they were worried about the procedure being outlawed.

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“Since Mr. Trump’s reelection, many women and health care providers across the U.S. have been stockpiling supplies of abortion pills and emergency contraception.

“One of the largest suppliers of abortion medication reported that in the first 24 hours after Election Day, they received 17 times the number of requests they typically get in a day.”

This is similar to the assault-weapon analogy I made earlier.

It’s possible many of the higher abortion numbers we’re seeing are not even abortions. They’re just people using telemedicine and saying they need abortion pills just in case.

You’re required to take a pregnancy test to get these pills, but you don’t have to send in proof of a positive pregnancy test.

You just have to fill out a questionnaire.

Now, I’m not saying this is the majority of the increase in chemical abortions, but that it is a significant enough data point that it can skew the numbers.

But these laws do provide tangible benefits to unborn children when abortion is restricted or banned.

For example, studies have shown that nearly 10,000 more children were born than usual in Texas in 2021 due to passage of the state’s abortion ban.

If you’d like more information on this topic, I recommend my previous episode, “Fact-Checking James Talarico on Texas Abortion Law,” linked below, and the second edition of my book Persuasive Pro-Life: How to Talk About Our Culture’s Toughest Issue, available from Catholic Answers Press.

Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.