LOUISVILLE, Ky. (KT) – Monday marked 51 years since the Supreme Court established a right to elective abortion nationwide under the banner of Roe v. Wade. It is also two days shy of 19 months since the high court gutted their earlier decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, returning the issue of abortion legality to the states.
Under the rule of Roe
Since 1973, when abortion was legalized in Kentucky and beyond, at least 297,015 lives have been lost to abortion in the commonwealth.
At least 119,083 Kentucky residents are included in that figure, but 26 years of data are missing. Since 2017 alone, residents of at least 30 other states have obtained abortions in the commonwealth.
Only 967 abortions were reported in Kentucky during 1973, but the annual numbers quickly soared to as high as 11,340 by 1979 – bringing the decade total to 53,573 terminated pregnancies. Abortions peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, when there were 78,045 and 79,451 legal abortions reported to the CDC. A major drop came in the 2000s and 2010s; both decades dipped below 40,000 total abortions.
Overwhelmingly, women aged 20-24 had the most abortions in Kentucky, with the 25-29 demographic trailing behind. There were 40,876 teenagers 19 or younger who had abortions; 1,929 of those young women were under 15 years old.
Information on the gestational age of aborted fetuses was only reported by the CDC beginning in 1987, leaving 14-year gap in Kentucky’s abortion history. Since that time, approximately 160,528 abortions occurred in the first trimester; 32,910 were performed in the second or third trimesters.
Nearly 90 percent of reported abortions were completed via surgical procedures, which included suction curettage, sharp curettage and dilation and evacuation. Only 15,661 unborn lives were ended using medication. Saline and prostaglandin instillation were used to terminate 93 pregnancies, though the procedure was not reported after 2000.
Most abortions in the past 51 years were performed on women who had given birth at least once prior to the procedure. Only 70,116 had not birthed a child at the time of the abortion; over 15,000 were mothers to three or more children.
While 58,989 women were repeat patients having received one or more previous abortions, nearly 100,000 women obtained their first abortion between January 1989 and November 2023.
Following a consistent decline in reported legal abortions starting in 2010, the procedure was once again on the rise in Kentucky. In 2020 and 2021, abortions surpassed the 4,000 annual threshold for the first time in a decade.
However, Dobbs v. Jackson derailed that trend.
Post-Dobbs
Following a legal tennis match throughout the summer of 2022, a state appeals court allowed the Kentucky’s trigger abortion ban to be enforced on August 1. The state’s Supreme Court later upheld the lower court’s ruling in February 2023, ruling that the abortion clinics who challenged the total abortion ban and 15-week abortion ban did not have “first party standing” to sue on behalf of their clients.
Without a client plaintiff, the clinics dropped their legal challenge in the spring, only to return with a pregnant Kentuckian in December. “Jane Doe” claimed she was “suffering medical, constitutional, and irreparable harm” because she was denied the ability to end her pregnancy. When the woman discovered her embryo no longer had a heartbeat, she withdrew her legal challenge.
Since Kentucky’s abortion bans were enforced, only 18 abortions have been performed in Kentucky — all legal. Under Kentucky law, abortions are permitted to protect the life and health of the mother. The exception allows physicians to perform an abortion if he or she decides, within “reasonable medical judgment,” that the abortion is necessary to prevent death, a substantial risk of death or serious damage to a life-sustaining organ of the pregnant woman.
The Vital Statistics branch of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, which has published Kentucky’s abortion data since 2017, has scaled back demographic information released through the Open Records Act since August 2022. The following information has not been included in records obtained monthly by Kentucky Today since July 2022: previous live births, other pregnancy terminations, the facility where the abortion was performed, race and age.
Editor’s Note: Information for this report was gathered from the Center for Disease Control and Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services and reflects Kentucky abortions through November 2023. Gaps in data provided to the CDC and multiple changes to the formatting and reporting of abortion statistics by the CDC in the past five decades leaves many questions unanswered when examining the history of Kentucky’s abortion landscape.
According to the Pew Research Center, data compiled by the CDC is voluntarily submitted by a state’s central health agency. Not every state reports abortion data each year, leaving gaps in the annual totals reported by the CDC. Kentucky submitted this information each year starting in 1973, but was only mandated by state law to report the data publicly in 2017.
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