Sources

Special tabulations of data from Frost JJ et al., Publicly Funded Contraceptive Services at U.S. Clinics, 2015, New York: Guttmacher Institute, 2017, https://www.guttmacher.org/report/publicly-funded-contraceptive-services-us-clinics-2015.

Jones RK and Jerman J, Abortion incidence and service availability in the United States, 2014, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2017, 49(1), doi:10.1363/psrh.12015.

Finer LB and Zolna MR, Declines in unintended pregnancy in the United States, 2008–2011, The New England Journal of Medicine, 2016, 374(9):843–852, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1506575#t=abstract.

Note:

This infographic projects the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions that would have occurred without the contraceptive services provided by Planned Parenthood in 2015. To do so, we began with the numbers of unintended pregnancies and abortions that were averted nationally by the provision of publicly funded contraceptive care, published in Publicly Funded Contraceptive Services at U.S. Clinics, 2015.

In 2015, the total number of unintended pregnancies averted in the United States among clients of all safety-net centers was 1.34 million. Since Planned Parenthood served 32% of all safety-net clients in that year, we estimated that 32% of those averted pregnancies, some 430,000, were averted by services provided by Planned Parenthood health centers in 2015. Out of that total, 140,000 would have resulted in abortions. We then added these averted events to the total numbers of unintended pregnancies and abortions using the most recent data available, which yielded the projected numbers for each type of event that would have occurred without the contraceptive services provided by Planned Parenthood.

The proportion of averted unintended pregnancies that would have ended in abortion is estimated to be the same as the proportion of actual unintended pregnancies that did end in abortion. Therefore, the projected proportionate increases for both unintended pregnancy and abortion in the absence of the contraceptive services provided by Planned Parenthood health centers are the same—in this instance, 15%.