Published: February 2, 2011

In December, New York City’s health department published the 2009 data on pregnancy outcomes, which included some figures for abortions that caused outrage among conservatives. Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, lamented in a speech that in 2009, 41 percent of pregnancies resulted in abortions. This is double the national average, thus supposedly showing a failure of sex education offered in the city. But statistics can be misleading, and some distinctions need to be made. Ultimately, the data shows that educational efforts targeted at teens work well and efforts should be put elsewhere.

First, any figure includes abortions performed for non-residents who came to the city to have an abortion. There is no reasonable policy the city can adopt to reduce those occurrences, so we have to exclude them from our consideration. Fortunately, the health department report includes plenty of raw data to work with.

The first observation is that someone at the Archbishop’s office used data from the wrong table (which ended up being cited throughout the media), and the actual percentage is 38.7 percent—or a total of 87,273 abortions (or induced terminations, as the report calls them) out of 225,667 pregnancies. If we exclude non-residents and those whose residency is unknown (i.e. people who came to the city to give birth or have an abortion), the total number of abortions drops to slightly below 80,000 and the percentage remains relatively unchanged at 38.5 percent.

There is a clear and observable trend that shows a decrease in the number of abortions. A graph in the report shows a steady decline since 1990, though the actual figures are available only starting with the year 2000. Then, almost 94,500 abortions were performed. That number has decreased significantly for all age groups except for people over 40 and is now more than 7,000 less (a decrease of about eight percent). To rule out an alternative explanation (i.e. that people simply left the city), I should note that the population of the city increased by almost 400,000 people in that time. This is good evidence that we are on the right track.

Dolan further suggests that sex education is failing. If we want to look at the effects of sex education, we cannot merely look at the total number of abortions. Instead, we need to look at data by age group. In 2000, 601 pregnancies were terminated for mothers younger than 15, and 15,497 for women between the ages of 15 and 19. In 2009, those numbers dropped to 461 and 13,577 respectively (decreases of 23 percent and 12.4 percent respectively). Both decreases are much higher than the overall average, suggesting significant improvements for the age groups likely to benefit from sex education.

It is, of course, unreasonable to look at people who were over 30 in 2000 and suggest their having more abortions now is due to failing school programs. With women over a certain age, abortions may be performed because the child would be born with a severe disability. It can be expected that such abortions will become more numerous as early screening techniques improve (and women choose to have children at a later age).

Dolan calls for a reduction in the number of abortions, which I am sure we can all agree on. But if we want effective policy, we have to analyze the available data without trying to distort it to fit a preconceived agenda. The data does reveal causes for concern. Hispanics and African-Americans, for example, account for almost 80 percent of all abortions. Thus, any effort to significantly reduce abortions must consider targeting these communities specifically and further studying why there is such a disparity.

The church continues to oppose the use of birth control, but the data shows that pregnancies are terminated early on: a third of all induced terminations occur before the sixth week of gestation, and 80 percent are performed in the first 10 weeks of the pregnancy. It seems therefore likely that there are not unforeseen challenges that arise late during the pregnancy, but that the pregnancies were never planned and are terminated as they are noticed. Consequently, promoting the use of birth control should prevent many of these pregnancies and thus reduce the need for abortions. Any such campaign would be more effective with the involvement of the clergy, especially in communities that strongly identify with the Catholic faith. However, that would require the Catholic Church to change its view on contraceptives—and despite the call to reduce the number of abortions, that seems unlikely to happen.