The strategy of the institutional antiabortion movement over the last fifty years has been to overturn the Supreme Court’s creation of a constitutional right to abortion and then change the state laws that govern the practice of abortion so as to make them more strict. This strategy was nominally aimed at reducing the number of abortions in the United States, but antiabortion movement leaders have seemed largely uninterested in the question of how much it would actually do that.

We recently got some initial answers to this question, courtesy of an impressive data collection effort undertaken by the Society of Family Planning (SFP). In April of this year, prior to the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, the SFP began collecting monthly data from 79 percent of abortion providers in the country. With this data, they have been able to estimate the number of abortions being conducted in each state every month between April and August of this year.

There are two main reasons to doubt that the overturn-then-restrict strategy of the antiabortion movement would make much of a dent in the number of abortions being conducted in the United States.