Abortion rates decline overall, increasing in poor, By Sharon Jayson, May 23, 2011, USA Today: “Abortion rates fell among most groups of women between 2000 and 2008, except for those classified as poor, finds an analysis conducted by the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute and published online today in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. Guttmacher, which has been tracking abortion since 1974, found that the abortion rate for low-income women increased 18% during the same period that the national rate dropped 8%. Low-income women (as an example, those earning $17,170 or less in a three-person household) accounted for 514,040 abortions, or 42% of all abortions, in 2008. The abortion rate for the poor rose from 44.4 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44 in 2000 to 52.2 in 2008. At the same time, the 2008 national abortion rate was 19.6 per 1,000, which dropped 8% from a rate of 21.3 in 2000. Sociologist Carole Joffe of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, says the report re-affirms demographic trends…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty