State health officials in Arkansas announced that the total number of abortions for 2023 was zero, in a state of 1.5 million women, while official records in South Dakota also show that zero abortions were performed that year.
NPR reported Thursday that government officials in nearly a dozen states with total or near-total abortion bans declared that zero or very few abortions took place in their states in 2023, which is the most recent year for which data is available.
Recorded in the first full year after the Supreme Court reversed the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, those statistics have been applauded by anti-abortion activists. But doctors and researchers say that the reported numbers paint an inaccurate picture of the abortion landscape in those states.
"To say there are no abortions going on in South Dakota is ludicrous," Amy Kelley, an OB-GYN in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, told NPR. Kelley cited female patients who have come to her hospital after taking abortion pills or to have medical procedures to prevent death or terminate nonviable pregnancies.
"I can think of five off the top of my head that I dealt with, and I have 15 partners," she said.
Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California-San Francisco, said the zeroing out of abortions in these states is statistically unlikely and "so clinically dishonest."
Upadhyay co-chairs an academic research initiative called WeCount that has kept a tally of abortions nationwide since April 2022. According to WeCount, there was a slight rise in the number of abortions nationally in 2023.
"We know they are sometimes necessary to save the pregnant person's life, so I do hope there are abortions occurring in South Dakota," she told NPR.
According to Tia Kafka, the marketing and outreach director for the South Dakota Department of Health, the department "compiles information it receives from healthcare organizations around the state and reports it accordingly."
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, state officials in five Republican-led states reported a steep drop in the official number of abortions.
In Arkansas, there were officially zero abortions in 2023, compared to 1,621 in 2022. Texas reported 60 abortions in 2023, compared to 50,783 in the state in 2021. Idaho's official abortion tally for 2023 came to five, while it recorded 1,553 in 2021. And in South Dakota, where stringent abortion restrictions had been put in place years before the Dobbs decision, there were zero official abortions in 2023, compared to 192 in 2021.
Rose Mimms, executive director of Arkansas Right to Life, called the sharp decline in abortions a "win-win" in a statement.
"Undoubtedly, many Arkansas pregnant mothers were spared from the lifelong regrets and physical complications abortion can cause, and babies are alive today in Arkansas," Mimms said. "That's a win-win for them and our state."
In an email to NPR, Ashley Whitlow, spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Health, said the department "is not able to track abortions that take place out of the state or outside of a healthcare facility," adding that state officials collect data from "in-state providers and facilities for the Induced Abortion data reports as required by Arkansas law."
Mimms acknowledged that state surveillance reports do not tell the whole story about what's going on in the Natural State.
"Women are still seeking out abortions in Arkansas, whether it's illegally or going out of state for illegal abortion," Mimms told KFF Health News. "We're not naive."
Ishan Mehta, director for media and democracy at Common Cause, a nonpartisan public interest group, told NPR that "government data is the official record" of a state, "for better or worse."
"You are not just reporting data," Mehta said. "You are feeding into an ecosystem that is going to have much larger ramifications."
Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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