Courts have ruled that a Texas can enforce a law requiring women be shown sonograms of their unborn babies before having an abortion, despite the fact the law is being challenged in court.
You can read more about the law and the case in this AP story (subscription required).
The Center for Disease Control recently published an overview of America’s abortion trends for the year 2008. Family Research Council out of Washington, D.C., has released a summary of the report here.
Included in the article are points explaining why it’s so hard to draw definite conclusions from the CDC’s reports, estimations on the actual abortion trends in America, and overviews of the types of abortions performed.
The Center for Disease Control has released statistics on abortion in America for the year 2008. Out of 45 states and the District of Columbia, Arkansas ranked 30, with 4,781 abortions performed. Five states, California, Florida, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Wyoming, could not be included in the CDC’s figures for various reasons.
The five states with the most abortions performed in 2008 were New York (124,304), Texas (81,155), Illinois (42,413), Pennsylvania (38,801), and Georgia (35,888).
The five states with the least abortions (in other words, the ones who are doing something right) were South Dakota (848), North Dakota (1,386), Idaho (1,481), Vermont (1,491), and Alaska (1,753).
Here is a list of all 45 states surveyed, taken from the CDC’s latest report (Note: These numbers are approximated based on portions of the CDC’s report; totals provided by the CDC for each state are inconsistent throughout the report because of different reporting methods used by different states; by some estimations, Arkansas may have had as many as 5,000 abortions performed, 15% of which were on out-of-state residents). (more…)