What were the total number of live births and recorded abortions in the US in 2022?
Executive summary
The CDC’s Abortion Surveillance report for 2022 shows 613,383 legal induced abortions reported from 48 reporting areas and—restricting to the 47 areas that reported continuously from 2013–2022—609,360 abortions with an abortion ratio of 199 abortions per 1,000 live births (implying roughly 3.06 million live births in those areas) [1]. The CDC figures are partial: the agency’s voluntary reporting excludes several major reporting areas, so the true U.S. totals for all jurisdictions require caution and, for some measures, cannot be stated from these sources alone [2] [3].
1. The headline numbers the CDC provides: abortions counted in 2022
The CDC reports that 613,383 legal induced abortions were received from 48 reporting areas for 2022; when analysis is limited to the 47 areas that reported every year during 2013–2022, the total reported abortions for 2022 was 609,360 [1]. The agency also calculated an abortion rate of 11.2 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years and an abortion ratio of 199 abortions per 1,000 live births for those 47 continuous reporting areas [1].
2. What “abortion ratio” means and the implied live-birth count
The CDC defines the abortion ratio as the number of abortions per 1,000 live births; using the CDC’s paired figures for the 47 continuously reporting areas (609,360 abortions and a ratio of 199 per 1,000 live births) implies approximately 3,062,110 live births in those same areas in 2022 (calculated from 609,360 ÷ 0.199) [1]. That implied live-birth estimate is a mathematical derivation based on CDC-published abortions and the CDC’s abortion-per-live-birth ratio; the CDC report itself does not present that specific live-birth total for the subset in the same table of the surveillance summary [1].
3. Limits of the CDC surveillance and why national totals vary
CDC surveillance is built from voluntary reporting by states and jurisdictions, and historically some large areas do not supply data to the CDC’s surveillance tables; therefore the CDC totals do not necessarily equal a full national count [2] [3]. The CDC report and public summaries repeatedly note that different methodologies and incomplete jurisdictional participation produce differing totals between the CDC and independent researchers [2]. That caveat matters: a “national” abortion count depends on which collection is used (CDC’s voluntary reports versus other efforts that attempt full-provider enumeration), and the sources provided here do not include a complete standalone CDC-published live-birth total for all U.S. jurisdictions in 2022.
4. Trends and context the CDC emphasizes
Comparing 2021 to 2022 within the CDC’s reporting set, the total number of reported abortions decreased about 2% (from 622,108 to the 2022 total), the abortion rate decreased about 3%, and the abortion ratio decreased about 2%—changes the CDC highlights as short-term declines within the reporting areas [1]. The CDC also reports a marked increase in early medication abortions—over half of abortions in 2022 were early medication abortions—which is part of broader shifts in how abortions are provided even as counts change [4].
5. What this reporting does and does not show; alternate data sources
The CDC surveillance provides an authoritative, consistently defined time series for reporting areas but is explicitly not a complete census of all abortions and births in the United States because of voluntary jurisdictional participation [2] [3]. Independent groups and data aggregators (for example, Guttmacher Institute historically, and commercial aggregators such as Statista) use different collection methods and often produce higher national abortion estimates; those alternative estimates are not contained in the sources provided for this brief and therefore are not reported here [5] [6]. Readers should expect differing national totals depending on the dataset and the jurisdictions included.