Despite the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists calling abortion an “essential component of women’s health care,” Michigan has become the latest state to stop requiring collection of statistics on the procedure.
The Reproductive Health Act, signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on November 21, 2023, amends the state’s Public Health Code to remove the requirement that clinics report the age, race, general residence, and physical complications that may result from abortions. The Act also repeals the requirement that abortion facilities be licensed as freestanding surgical outpatient facilities, in addition to other provisions.
Michigan had been collecting abortion data for 45 years until 2023.
“For years, women and their doctors faced burdensome requirements when seeking abortion care that had no basis in medicine and were designed to dissuade women from accessing the care they needed,” MDHHS spokesperson Lynn Sutfin told Bridge magazine on June 11.
Patchwork of Data
Five other states in addition to Michigan no longer collect abortion data to submit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says Mia Steupert, a research assistant at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Those states are California, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and North Dakota.
“Several other states only report abortion data to the CDC for its annual abortion surveillance report that are published two years behind schedule,” said Steupert. “These states [and D.C.] include Hawaii, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington. To make matters worse, the states that report data solely to the CDC often do not report all data points that the CDC publishes in their annual summary.”
The Charlotte Lozier Institute and Guttmacher are two nongovernmental organizations that track abortion data. Steupert says the data is often “delayed, sporadic, and poor-quality.”
“Abortion reporting in the United States is, overall, of poor quality and resembles a patchwork of quality, requirements, and laws,” said Steupert.
Zero Abortions?
The fact that several states have banned abortion has made data reporting even more sporadic and inaccurate. Steupert cites the cases of Oklahoma and South Dakota.
“The states reported zero abortions occurred,” said Steupert. “However, the states failed to report any of the exceptions data and did tell me in an email that the zero figures did not take into account the abortions which they could not track: abortion drugs being shipped into the state from pro-abortion states with [privacy] shield laws.”
In its last report, released this summer, Michigan reported 31,000 abortions, an increase of 3.7 percent from the previous year.
The Michigan report included information on the type of facility where the abortion was performed, age of gestation, type of procedure, ultrasound verification, complications, and whether the abortion failed. The report also included information on the patient’s marital status, age, residing state, history of abortion, origin of referral, and the payer.
AnneMarie Schieber (amschieber@heartland.org) is the managing editor of Health Care News.
