A little more than halfway through 2022, a federal appeals court allowed a new Georgia law to take effect that decreased the number of abortions in the state by nearly half.
Still, the number of Georgia residents receiving abortions last year ticked up for the fifth consecutive year, according to data from the Georgia Department of Public Health. That’s because DPH numbers made public on the OASIS online portal include abortions performed on Georgia residents, whether the procedure was done in the state or elsewhere.
The latest abortion figures, for 2022, were released by the DPH last week, a little more than a year after enforcement began of a state law banning the procedure in most instances once a doctor can detect fetal cardiac activity, which is often about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many know they are pregnant.
State records show 35,401 abortions were performed on Georgia residents in 2022, a rate of 10.4 abortions per 1,000 females between the ages of 10 and 55. That is 416 more abortions than were reported in 2021, when 34,988 abortions were performed at a rate of 10.3 abortions per 1,000 females.
But the number of abortions Georgians received in other states jumped from 287 in 2021 to 4,604 in 2022.
Vivienne Kerley-de la Cruz, the Georgia state and campaigns director for Planned Parenthood Southeast, said abortion rights activists have worked hard to make sure people who want abortions are still able to get them — even if it means referring them out of state.
“Abortion in Georgia and throughout the Southeast has become incredibly inaccessible,” she said. “We’ve worked to make sure folks have access to the care that they want and need. Banning abortion will never eliminate the procedure; it just makes it harder for the most vulnerable (rural and/or low-income) people to access it.”
The numbers are shared between states through a national agreement, but since it is not required, not all states participate — meaning the actual numbers are likely higher. For example, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that a number of Georgia residents traveled to Florida to get abortions, but Florida does not share that data with other states.
Claire Bartlett, executive director of Georgia Life Alliance, said it was disappointing that the number of abortions didn’t change much despite the new law being in place. But Bartlett said she was pleased the number of abortions happening in the state has fallen.
DPH records show a vast drop in the number of reported abortions performed in Georgia once the law took effect in late July 2022.
“We’re pleased about the numbers going down and people thinking this through, but we have some other issues that we want to address, including making people understand that we’re taking a human life,” she said.
After steadily decreasing the previous five years, the number of births in Georgia began to increase in 2021. The state saw another jump in births in 2022, with 126,001 reported births last year. That’s an increase of about 3%, or 3,622 more births than in 2021.
After years of decline, the number of abortions jumped by nearly 4% from 2017 to 2018, by more than 7% from 2018 to 2019, about 2% between 2019 and 2020, and about 12% between 2020 and 2021.
Despite the recent increase in the number of abortions performed, the rate the procedure occurs in Georgia is still down from 13.7 per 1,000 females in 1994, the earliest data available, to 10.4 last year. Experts have said the decrease can mostly be attributed to increased access to various forms of birth control.
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