{"id":235211,"date":"2020-12-02T07:30:45","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T13:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=235211"},"modified":"2021-01-08T23:23:03","modified_gmt":"2021-01-09T05:23:03","slug":"cdc-abortions-decline-black-women-extremely-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/cdc-abortions-decline-black-women-extremely-high\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest CDC report: Abortions have declined among Black women but remain extremely high"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

As Planned Parenthood attempts to push<\/a> the legacy of its founder\u00a0Margaret Sanger<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a eugenicist and one-time Ku Klux Klan speaker \u2014 into the closet, a glimmer of hope may be emerging despite the longtime eugenic history of abortion in the United States.\u00a0For decades, leaders in the Black community\u00a0warned<\/a> about abortion’s potential use as a tool of Black genocide \u2014\u00a0and according to statistics in recent years, Black abortions have remained disproportionately high. But there may be reason to hope that is changing, according to new data just\u00a0published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).<\/p>\n

The CDC’s newly released data shows that abortions among Black women dropped from a recent high of 38% in\u00a02016<\/a>\u00a0to nearly 34% in\u00a02018<\/a>,\u00a0<\/b>based on numbers provided from 31 reporting areas in 2018 (32 reported in 2016).The CDC requests data from 52 total reporting areas, which includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City. The reporting health agencies from each of these areas can voluntary report, or decline to report their abortion statistics. This means of the total estimated number of abortions in 2018 (619,591), 31 reporting areas indicated the race or ethnicity of 350,124 aborted children.While the data is limited, based on the decline in the percentage of Black abortions from 2016 to 2018 (38% to 34% of total aborted children whose race or ethnicity was reported), one can estimate that total Black abortions dropped by 12% in these reporting areas.<\/p>\n

While this is good news, Black Americans still accounted for a large portion of abortions committed in the United States in 2018<\/a>, with a continued high abortion rate<\/strong>\u00a0of 21.2 abortions (per 1,000 women aged 15\u201344 years), as well as a high\u00a0abortion ratio<\/strong>\u00a0of 335 (number of abortions per 1,000 live births). But even there the trend is beginning to turn downward.<\/p>\n

In 2018<\/a>, the abortion rate among Black Americans dropped nearly 37% from its high (33.5) in 2008. Likewise, the abortion ratio among Black Americans also declined by nearly 31% from its high (483) in 2010.<\/p>\n

\"Image:

Estimated Black abortions 2010 to 2016 and 2018 past decade (Graph: Live Action News)<\/p><\/div>\n

The downward trend among Black Americans holds even when you examine the abortion percentage over the past decade (2010-2018). The CDC reported a total of\u00a0765,651 abortions in\u00a02010<\/a>, with an overall decline of 19% to 619,591 abortions in\u00a02018<\/a>. During this time, abortions among Black women declined from almost 36% in\u00a02010<\/a>\u00a0to almost 34%\u00a0in\u00a02018<\/a>.\u00a0The decrease was also seen among Hispanic women, with a decline from 21% in\u00a02010<\/a>\u00a0to 20%\u00a0in 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n

White women, however, saw an increase in their overall percentage of abortions during this time frame, climbing from nearly 37% in\u00a02010<\/a>\u00a0to almost 39%\u00a0in\u00a02018<\/a>.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0New CDC report shows 57% drop in abortions from record high in 1990<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The two major reporting agencies \u2014\u00a0the CDC as well as\u00a0Planned Parenthood’s former “special affiliate,” the\u00a0Guttmacher Institute \u2014 have both published recent abortion data. Guttmacher’s latest data is from\u00a02017<\/a>, while the CDC’s is from\u00a02018<\/a>. But only the CDC has recently updated its data on\u00a0race and ethnicity<\/em>. The most recent data<\/a> on race published by Guttmacher is from 2014, and states, \u201cWhite patients accounted for 39% of abortion procedures in 2014, black patients for 28%, Hispanic patients for 25%, and patients of other races and ethnicities for 9%.\u201d<\/p>\n

Live Action News has analyzed the 2018<\/a>\u00a0CDC report further below. Note that the data is\u00a0based on 31 reporting areas to the CDC (350,124 abortions) for race\/ethnicity,\u00a0a decline from the 32 reporting areas in 2016<\/a>. Abortion estimates are calculated using each group’s abortion percentage times the total of 619,591 abortions reported in\u00a02018<\/a>.<\/p>\n

White abortions in 2018:<\/strong><\/p>\n