Nearly one in 20 women will procure an abortion in her first 20 years of life, according to a recent analysis by the Guttmacher Institute. By age 30, that number approaches one in five. By age 45, nearly a quarter of American women will abort a child.
Such a staggering figure provokes disbelief. It must be a statistical sleight of hand — a small number of women obtaining many abortions, while the overwhelming majority of women abstain entirely, leaving an average of one in four. Some women do indeed procure multiple abortions. Nevertheless, according to the Guttmacher analysis, the one-in-four statistic reflects individual women. “We used age-specific first abortion rates to estimate the lifetime incidence of abortion,” write the authors of the study. No matter how many abortions a woman will procure during her lifetime, roughly one in four will obtain at least one.
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