Here’s Why the CDC is Not Publishing Annual Abortion Data

Every year, typically the day before Thanksgiving, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued its Abortion Surveillance report, usually giving us abortion data from most of the states for two years earlier. It takes that long to compile it.

This year, Thanksgiving came and went, and, surprisingly, no study from the CDC.

We were especially anxious to see this year’s report. It would have given us data from 2023, the first full year since Dobbs and the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Though CDC numbers have always been incomplete, always undercounting and missing data from some critical states since at least 1998, their regular appearance and standardized format have always given us useful information about abortion trends in America.

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This time, however, nothing. No report, no official announcement, no explanation.

The folks at LiveAction did some digging and found out that no report would be coming this year (11/25/25), a story now confirmed by HealthDay News (12/10/26).

What at first was described as a “pause” in the CDC’s data collection turned out to be the consequence of a lot of intrigue at the agency.

According to HealthDay, 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said former CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry stopped the work, claiming she instructed staff to return state-submitted data instead of analyzing it.

Houry denied that, saying the CDC lost key staff after thousands of HHS employees were laid off in April.

“The policy that was proposed by the agency to us — that we signed off on — was that there’s no funding, no staff, and not statutorily required [so] the program can’t do the work,” Houry told CNN. “The politicals were all aware, back in April, that this was one of the programs that couldn’t continue, along with many others.”

LiveAction reported on 11/26/25 that Health and Human Services Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said that Houry was indeed responsible and that “CDC staff are now working to address this incompetence and complete the Abortion Surveillance report for release in spring 2026.”

It is unclear how complete or informative that new data will be.  Several states, due to changes in their laws, had few if any abortions to report to the CDC after June of 2022. Most abortion clinics closed in states where they were no longer legal, thankfully giving them few if any abortions to report.

States currently lack any effective way of tracking how many abortion pills are illegally shipped into the state. And women traveling out of state would have their abortions counted, not in their home state, but in the state where they were performed.

So new numbers from those states still performing abortions would generally include the women coming from out of state, but do not at this point have official data on abortion pills shipped from their states to women in states with pro-life protections.

Further complicating the effort to come up with accurate national totals, some states, including populous abortion promoters like California, have not published official numbers for years.

Some data on the women traveling to other states, the types of abortions being performed, gestational ages, and whether these border crossers shifted any of the abortion demographics, will probably be available when the new data is released next Spring.

The CDC, like others, is still coming to terms with the new limits on data collection since the 2022  Dobbs decision.  Certain “providers,” certain states, are no longer sending in the data they used to.

Guttmacher, which used to do a comprehensive survey of every abortionist it could find every two or three years, has instead adopted a sampling procedure where it collects and publishes estimates every month. While they appear to show some rise since Dobbs, the accuracy of their new estimates isn’t really clear, especially since the advent of mailed abortion pills that bypass traditional clinics.

Another source for abortion numbers is the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning. SFP began its “We Count” survey of abortionists a few months before Dobbs and has tried to track the number of abortions provided by telemedicine.  Beyond the usual questions about the representativeness of their samples and the accuracy of their derivations, there are serious questions about their methodology when it comes to mailed abortion pills.

LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee.