Rising Rates of Abortions

I was searching for some blog worthy articles to write a piece on and as I was skimming through tittles I saw the claim that 40% of women get abortions. I guess the article was the author defending the statistic that she had used in another article. Like many people, so many in fact that she had to do the math just to make the statistic legitimate, I questioned it.

I started with this statistic from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that studies reproductive health and supports abortion rights: “From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.” According to the census, the United States population was 295,753,151 in 2005 (I used this, rather than its most recent estimate, to stay consistent with the Guttmacher figure, which counted abortions only through 2005). That population is 50.7 percent (150 million people) female. Subtract the 24.3 percent of the population that is under 18 and you’re down to 113.6 million women. Forty-five million is 39.6 percent of that, or, as I wrote it, “about 40 percent.”

At first i thought i was a huge overestimate, but I feel like over time the number can only go up. The more normal having a sex life becomes the more likely more and more people will have mistakes. What I mean by normal is that the more socially acceptable it is the more likely the number of people having sex earlier will start there for having more chances to get pregnant.