This reversal of the trend "underlines that the need for abortive care is increasing in the United States, just when the Supreme Court seems ready to bury the Roe v. Wade judgment" which has guaranteed since 1973 the right of American women to have an abortion, writes the Guttmacher Institute in this document.

The high court must render a decision before the end of the month which could, according to a draft judgment revealed in May, send the United States back 50 years, when each State was free to prohibit terminations of pregnancy on its soil. .

In the meantime, the Guttmacher Institute, which campaigns for access to contraception and abortion worldwide, has noted an upsurge in abortions in the country, the reasons for which seem difficult to explain at this stage.

More than 930,000 abortions took place in 2020 in the United States against 860,000 in 2017, a rate of 14.4 abortions per thousand women of childbearing age against 13.5 three years earlier, according to his report.

This corresponds to one in five pregnancies.

The increase is perceptible in all regions of the country, with variations from one state to another and sometimes even within them.

Local reforms could explain these differences (the opening of new clinics in a State, or the reimbursement by the State of the costs for abortion...) but the global trend remains more complex to understand, according to the document.

For thirty years, the number of abortions carried out each year in the United States had fallen sharply – it was more than 1.5 million until the beginning of the 1990s – thanks to progress in access to contraception.

The figures compiled every three years by the Guttmacher Institute from clinics performing abortions refer to the United States in the absence of complete official data.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does not have statistics from several highly populated states, such as California or Maryland, and only recorded 630,000 abortions in 2019.

© 2022 AFP