How Many Abortions Are There Per Day in the US?

Somewhere between roughly 1,700 and 2,800 abortions take place in the United States each day, depending on which data source you use and which year you look at. The CDC’s most recent surveillance report, covering 2022, tallied about 613,000 abortions from 48 reporting areas, which works out to around 1,680 per day. The Guttmacher Institute, which surveys abortion providers directly and captures data from all 50 states, estimated approximately 1,037,000 abortions in the formal health care system in 2023, or roughly 2,840 per day. That gap is not a sign that one source is wrong; it reflects genuinely different methods of counting, and understanding both gives a much clearer picture of abortion in the U.S. today.

Why Two Major Sources Give Different Numbers

The CDC and the Guttmacher Institute are the two most widely cited trackers of U.S. abortion data, and they have never produced identical totals. The CDC collects its data through state health departments, which voluntarily report abortion figures. Not every state participates every year. For its 2022 report, the CDC received data from 48 of 52 reporting areas (the 50 states plus Washington, D.C., and New York City counted separately). California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have been inconsistent reporters over the years, and California alone accounts for a large share of the national total. When a high-volume state does not report, the CDC count drops substantially.

The Guttmacher Institute takes a different approach: it contacts abortion-providing clinics and medical offices directly through periodic surveys. Because it reaches providers in every state, its numbers have consistently run higher than the CDC’s. Despite those methodological differences, both sources have tracked similar trends over the past decade, with rates declining through much of the 2010s and then climbing again in recent years.¹

So when you see a daily figure, the range matters more than a single precise number. The CDC’s 2022 data translates to roughly 1,680 abortions per day.² Guttmacher’s 2023 estimate translates to roughly 2,840 per day.³ The true daily number almost certainly falls somewhere in that range, and the Guttmacher figure is generally considered more complete because it does not depend on state cooperation.

The Post-Dobbs Increase

Many people assume the number of abortions dropped after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which allowed states to ban or severely restrict the procedure. In fact, the opposite happened at the national level. Guttmacher’s estimate of about 1,037,000 abortions in 2023 represented an 11% increase over 2020, the last year with comprehensive pre-Dobbs data, and a rate of about 15.9 per 1,000 women of reproductive age.³ The CDC’s 2022 numbers showed a similar upward trajectory: 609,360 abortions in the 47 areas that reported consistently from 2013 to 2022, with the abortion rate rising to 11.2 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44.²

How did the national count go up even as more than a dozen states imposed near-total bans? The answer lies in where abortions shifted, not whether they stopped happening.

Geographic Reshuffling After State Bans

State-level bans did not eliminate demand; they moved it. People in ban states began traveling to neighboring states where the procedure remained legal, and the states that absorbed the largest influx tend to share a border with at least one ban state. Illinois saw about 32,560 patients traveling in from out of state. North Carolina took in roughly 17,870, Kansas about 13,630, and New Mexico around 10,180.⁴ These “destination states” experienced sharp increases in their own abortion volumes, which more than compensated for the drop in states with bans.

This interstate migration adds cost, time, and logistical difficulty for patients. Someone in Texas may need to travel to New Mexico or Kansas. Someone in Mississippi may need to reach Illinois. Travel expenses, time off work, childcare, and overnight stays stack up quickly, and they fall hardest on people who already have fewer resources.

Telehealth and Medication Abortion Across State Lines

The other major factor pushing the national count upward is the expansion of telehealth-based medication abortion. Several states have enacted “shield laws” that protect providers who prescribe abortion pills via telemedicine to patients in states where the procedure is restricted. The scale of this channel has grown quickly. Between July 2023 and September 2024, one provider alone, Aid Access, shipped over 118,000 medication abortion pill packs to residents across more than 2,600 U.S. counties. About 84% of those went to people in states with near-total bans or telemedicine bans.⁵

The demand signal is stark: after adjusting for population, the rate of prescriptions from this single telehealth provider was about three times higher in near-total-ban states than in states with protective laws.⁵ In other words, people in ban states are not simply forgoing abortion; many are obtaining medication through channels the bans were not designed to reach.

These telehealth-provided abortions present a counting problem for both the CDC and Guttmacher. Prescriptions shipped from a provider in one state to a patient in another may or may not show up in either state’s reporting. Some portion of the daily total likely goes uncaptured by the standard surveillance systems, meaning even the higher Guttmacher estimate could undercount the true number.

Self-Managed Abortion Outside the Formal System

Beyond telehealth, some people attempt to end pregnancies entirely on their own, without any clinical involvement. A nationally representative survey found that self-managed abortion methods varied widely and often did not involve standard abortion medications. The most commonly reported methods included herbs, non-abortion drugs, and physical approaches. Only about a fifth of respondents reported using misoprostol, the medication used in clinical protocols. Roughly 40% reported trying more than one method.⁶

The effectiveness of these non-clinical approaches was low. Fewer than a third of respondents said the method they used actually ended the pregnancy; about a third later had a facility-based abortion anyway, and roughly 13% continued the pregnancy to term.⁶ Self-managed attempts are virtually invisible to surveillance systems. They add an unknown number to the daily count that no data source captures well, and the proportion of people attempting self-managed abortion may have grown as legal access has contracted in many states.

Who Is Getting Abortions

The demographic profile of abortion patients is not what many people picture. According to CDC surveillance data for 2021, women in their twenties accounted for more than half of all abortions: those aged 20 to 24 made up about 28% of the total, and those aged 25 to 29 made up another 29%. Teens under 15 and adults over 40 were at opposite ends of the spectrum, accounting for less than 1% and about 4% respectively.⁷

The majority of people obtaining abortions have already given birth at least once. About 61% of abortion patients in 2021 had one or more previous live births, and roughly a quarter had two or more.⁷ The popular image of abortion as something that primarily happens to teenagers or to people who have never been pregnant does not match the data.

Racial and economic disparities in abortion rates are large and persistent. In the 2021 CDC data, Black women had the highest abortion rate at about 29 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, compared with roughly 6 per 1,000 for White women.⁷ Research has shown that both race and income independently predict abortion rates: women living below the federal poverty line have had abortion rates several times higher than those with higher incomes.⁸ These disparities reflect differences in access to contraception, insurance coverage, and economic stability rather than differences in attitudes toward abortion.

When Abortions Happen in Pregnancy

The vast majority of abortions in the U.S. happen early in pregnancy. In 2021, about 81% took place at nine weeks of gestation or earlier, and about 94% occurred within the first 13 weeks. Abortions between 14 and 20 weeks made up about 6% of the total, and those at 21 weeks or later accounted for less than 1%.⁹

Later abortions tend to involve different circumstances than early ones. They are more likely to involve fetal anomalies detected at an anatomy scan (usually done around 18 to 20 weeks) or serious maternal health complications. Delays in accessing care, such as those caused by financial barriers, travel requirements, or mandatory waiting periods, can also push abortions later into pregnancy. This is one reason researchers and clinicians are concerned about the effects of state-level restrictions: when barriers delay the procedure, a proportion of early abortions become later ones.

The Cost Barrier

For many people, the biggest obstacle is not legality but cost. The Hyde Amendment has long prohibited federal Medicaid funds from covering abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment, and many states have their own restrictions on private insurance coverage of the procedure. The practical result is that most people pay for abortion out of pocket.¹⁰

Even for those who technically have insurance that covers abortion, navigating the bureaucracy can cause delays. Qualitative research on abortion seekers has found that dealing with insurance paperwork, privacy concerns, and coverage restrictions can be as burdensome as paying out of pocket, and that financial obstacles often push people into later, more expensive procedures.¹¹ This matters for the daily count because cost does not necessarily prevent abortions so much as it delays them and concentrates the financial pain on people who can least afford it.

Research on removing cost barriers entirely shows just how much finances shape the picture. The Contraceptive CHOICE Project, which provided no-cost contraception to participants, found that abortion rates in its cohort were less than half the regional and national rates.¹² Free, effective contraception reduced the number of unintended pregnancies and, with them, the number of abortions. That finding suggests a significant share of the daily abortion count is connected not to personal choice about contraception but to access and affordability.

What Happens When People Are Denied Abortions

The daily number also exists in the context of the people who wanted an abortion but could not get one. The Turnaway Study, a landmark longitudinal research project, followed women who received an abortion just under a clinic’s gestational limit alongside women who were turned away because they were just past the limit. The two groups were otherwise similar, which made the comparison especially informative.

In the short term, women denied abortions reported more anxiety and lower self-esteem and life satisfaction compared to those who received them. Depression levels were similar between the groups initially.¹³ Over time, the mental health differences between the groups diminished, but the economic consequences did not. Women denied abortions experienced a large and lasting increase in financial distress that persisted for years, showing up clearly in credit report data.¹⁴ The daily count of abortions, then, does not capture the people who wanted one and were unable to obtain it. Their outcomes are part of the broader picture.

Abortion Restrictions and Maternal Mortality

A growing body of research links restrictive state-level abortion policies to higher maternal death rates. A scoping review of the available studies found a consistent pattern: states that restrict abortion have higher maternal mortality than those that protect or are neutral toward it. Specific types of restrictions carried measurable associations. Requirements that only licensed physicians perform abortions were linked to 51% higher total maternal mortality, and restrictions on state Medicaid funding for abortion were associated with 29% higher maternal mortality. States with more abortion-restricting laws on the books had an estimated 7% increase in maternal mortality for each additional restriction.¹⁵

These are associations, not proof that any single law directly caused a specific death. But the consistency across multiple studies, using different methods and time periods, makes the pattern difficult to dismiss. The mechanism is not hard to see: when abortion is restricted, some pregnancies that would have ended early instead continue, and pregnancy itself carries health risks, especially for people with pre-existing conditions. Additionally, the chilling effect on providers can delay necessary care even in emergencies.

Emergency Care in the Crossfire

One of the most concrete consequences of the post-Dobbs legal landscape is what happens in emergency rooms. Federal law requires hospitals that accept Medicare to stabilize any patient with an emergency condition, regardless of ability to pay. This obligation, known as EMTALA, can put physicians in states with abortion bans in a legal bind: state law may prohibit an abortion that federal law requires them to perform to stabilize a patient experiencing a life-threatening pregnancy complication.¹⁶

This is not hypothetical. States that enacted abortion bans with no health exception saw a substantial increase in EMTALA violations related to obstetric care, with an estimated 1.18 additional violations per quarter. Texas, which implemented its ban earlier than most states, showed an average of about 0.69 additional obstetric EMTALA violations per quarter after its law took effect.¹⁷ Each of those violations represents a situation where a patient in an emergency did not receive the care federal law says they should have. The daily abortion count does not include these cases where an abortion may have been medically necessary but was delayed or denied due to legal uncertainty.

Why the Numbers Are Hard to Pin Down

If you take away one thing from the data, it should be that no single number cleanly captures the daily reality of abortion in the United States. The CDC count undercounts because it depends on voluntary state reporting. The Guttmacher count is more complete but only updated periodically and may still miss telehealth-based prescriptions shipped across state lines. Neither captures self-managed abortions. And neither captures the people who wanted an abortion, could not get one, and carried a pregnancy to term.

The legal landscape is changing fast enough that data collected in one year may not reflect the situation even 18 months later. New state bans, new shield laws, new telehealth providers, and court rulings can all shift the geography and volume of abortion care in ways the surveillance systems take time to register. The daily number is a moving target, and the honest answer to how many abortions happen per day in the U.S. is “roughly 2,000 to 3,000 in the formal health care system, with an unknown additional number happening outside it, and the total appears to be rising even as legal access contracts in many states.”

1
KFF. Abortion Trends Before and After Dobbs
2
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2022
3
PubMed Central. Despite Bans, Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023
4
KFF. Abortion Trends Before and After Dobbs – Section: Interstate Travel
5
JAMA. Provision of Abortion Medications Using Online Asynchronous Telemedicine Under Shield Laws in the US
6
JAMA Network Open. Prevalence of Self-Managed Abortion Among Women of Reproductive Age in the United States
7
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2021
8
PubMed Central. Disparities in Abortion Rates: A Public Health Approach
9
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2021
10
PubMed. Trends In Self-Pay Charges And Insurance Acceptance For Abortion In The United States, 2017-20
11
PubMed Central. Real-Time Effects of Payer Restrictions on Reproductive Healthcare: A Qualitative Analysis of Cost-Related Barriers and Their Consequences among U.S. Abortion Seekers on Reddit
12
PubMed Central. Preventing unintended pregnancies by providing no-cost contraception
13
JAMA Psychiatry. Women’s Mental Health and Well-being 5 Years After Receiving or Being Denied an Abortion
14
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The Economic Consequences of Being Denied an Abortion
15
PubMed Central. The relationship between state-level abortion policy and maternal mortality in the United States: a scoping review
16
PubMed Central. Pregnancy Complications After Dobbs: The Role of EMTALA
17
JAMA Health Forum. Obstetric-Related Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act Violations and No Health Exception Bans