US abortions actually increased after Dobbs, which means forced-birthers are just getting started

If you need more evidence that Republicans will try to enact forced-birth laws nationwide if they ever retake the White House and Congress, you need look no further than their meager return on investment from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. In fact, since conservatives succeeded in vaporizing Roe v. Wade, abortions have actually gone up nationwide. It’s not a huge increase—around 0.2%—but you can rest assured MAGA Mike Johnson has noted it and wondered what ever happened to his glorious cornucopian-uteri utopia.

In a new episode of The New York Times’ “The Daily,” Margot Sanger-Katz, a contributor to The Times’ The Upshot column, discusses the counterintuitive results of the Dobbs decision, which ended Roe and threw the abortion question back to the states. The gist? Abortions have indeed gone down in states that prohibit abortions, but they’ve gone up enough in abortion-legal states to make up for those decreases.

“The estimate is that the number of abortions since the Supreme Court decision only went up by like 0.2%, but when you consider that there are all these states that banned abortion totally, where abortions went to zero, what it’s really telling us is that the states where abortion stayed legal increased by so much that they were able to sort of counterweight that reduction,” said Sanger-Katz. “And I think there are a couple of factors that really explain what’s going on here.”

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