Molly Malone Rumley
Springfield | The numbers are in, and they don’t look good. Abortions rose from almost 52,000 to more than 56,000 in Illinois after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. This tally includes the six-month period in 2022 when surrounding states were limiting or outlawing abortion. It’s the highest number recorded by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) since 1986, when 61,675 abortions were reported in the state.
What’s more, the number of minors receiving abortions jumped by nearly 25%.
“Those numbers are just staggering,” said Molly Malone Rumley of Illinois Right to Life. “I think sometimes it’s easy to just look at them and just see numbers, but as Christians we should look at those numbers and see the human lives behind them.”
Many progressive groups welcomed so-called “abortion tourism,” providing funding and lodging for out-of-state women to travel to Illinois to undergo the procedure. Abortion clinics closed shop in Texas, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, and reopened in the Land of Lincoln.
“New abortion clinics are opening up all the time,” said Rumley. “All around the state border, there are billboards that say, ‘Come get your safe legal abortions in Illinois,’ even though there are no regulations on it at all.” Planned Parenthood put one of its facilities on wheels in the form of mobile site that operates on along the state border. The Reproductive Health Act of 2019 removed inspection requirements for clinics along with most reporting standards.
Overall, abortions increased by about 9% from 51,797 in 2021 to 56,457 in 2022. The increase was driven by women traveling from out-of-state to undergo abortions—16,849 compared to around 11,307 in 2021. According to Planned Parenthood of Illinois, women from 40 other states have come to their sites to have abortions since the fall of Roe, mainly from Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Planned Parenthood reported a 54% increase in clients following the Court’s decision.
One surprising statistic was a small decrease in the number of Illinois women who had abortions, down from 40,073 in 2021 to 38,964 in 2022.
Women between the ages of 18-29 underwent the most abortions with 36,444, an increase of more than 8% over 2021. They were followed by women in the 30-39 age group who had 16,559 abortions, an increase of just over 10% from 2021.
Young women under age 18 undergoing abortions rose to 1,615, a jump of 24.5%. Rumley believes the jump is a result of repeal of the Parental Notification Act which took effect in June 2022.
Most abortions were performed at 8 weeks or less (49.5%), followed by (33.4%) performed at 8-11 weeks, (8.9%) at 12-15 weeks, (5.5%) at 16 weeks or more, and (2.6%) at an unreported number of weeks.
“I think we can only expect to see the number of abortions to increase,” Rumley said.