Pro-life advocates have made a lot of progress changing hearts and minds for life in the past decade. From 2008 to 2014, the abortion rate dropped a full 25%, according to a new report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Looking at data from the federal government and the Guttmacher Institute, the researchers found that abortions dropped from 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age (15 to 44) in 2008 to 14.6 per 1,000 in 2014, the Washington Post reports. Researchers said the biggest decline was in the 15 to 19 age group, at 46%. The abortion rate also dropped for the first time in 20 years for the poorest women in America – the demographic with the highest abortion rate, according to the group. The report found that abortion numbers dropped below 1 million in the United States for the first time in four decades.
The pro-abortion research group, considered to have the most comprehensive abortion numbers for the U.S., reported an estimated 926,200 abortions in 2014 and 958,700 in 2013. The abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age) also dropped to 14.6 per 1,000 in 2014, down 14% from 2011, according to the report.
