Dear Friend,

Since the last Vitals email landed in your inbox, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest national abortion data. According to that data, the number and rate of abortions in 2022—the year of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision—decreased by 2 or 3 percentage points from 2021. The report found that the abortion pill accounted for more than 57% of all recorded abortions in 2022, up by about 1 percentage point from the year before.

But the data paints an incomplete picture. Abortion reporting is voluntary, meaning that states aren’t required to inform the CDC of abortion numbers. This latest report might suggest an overall decrease, but it excludes data from major pro-abortion states, including California, that either don’t report or don’t collect abortion data.

The next CDC report will be even more fragmented, given recent state-level changes. For one, numbers from my home state of Michigan won’t be in the report. The number of abortions here hit a high in 2023 that we haven’t seen since the 1990s with 31,241 total abortions, and complications from abortion increased, according to last year’s Michigan data. That was the first year under our new constitutional right to abortion, which voters approved in 2022. But thanks to a law the pro-abortion legislature and governor passed earlier this year that repealed the state’s abortion reporting requirement, this could be the last year we ever get a count of the number of lives lost to abortion in our state.

Now for more of this week’s news from the life beat.

Also vital

Idaho’s minors protected: A federal appeals court last week ruled most of Idaho’s abortion trafficking ban enforceable. The law originally criminalized “recruiting, harboring, or transporting” minors out of the state to access abortions without the guardian’s consent. Abortion supporters sued, arguing that the law was overly vague and infringed on freedom of speech and the right to travel. U.S. Magistrate Judge Debora K. Grasham blocked the law’s enforcement shortly after Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little signed it in 2023. In last week’s ruling, the panel of three judges found that “recruiting” pregnant minors—or helping them decide to have abortions—should not be criminalized due to freedom of speech. But the judges also ruled enforceable a part of the law that makes it a felony to harbor and transport minors who are getting abortions without a guardian’s knowledge. Idaho law protects unborn babies from abortion in most cases, but abortion is legal in surrounding states. —Naomi Balk

Amendment fights continue: Even after pro-abortion amendments have taken effect in some states, pro-life and pro-abortion groups continue to fight over how those amendments will affect state laws.

• Missouri’s amendment guaranteeing a right to “reproductive freedom” took effect on Friday, but Planned Parenthood announced that it would not start scheduling patients for abortions just yet. The business is waiting on a state judge to rule in a case that could use the new pro-abortion amendment to block enforcement of the state’s strong protections for unborn babies.
• In Arizona, the new abortion amendment took effect during Thanksgiving week, prompting last week’s lawsuit from pro-abortion groups that seeks to gut the state’s current protections for babies after 15 weeks. The state’s pro-abortion Democratic attorney general said she will not enforce the law as the case continues.
• More than a year after Ohio voters approved that state’s new right to abortion, the pro-life Republican attorney general there is still fighting to preserve portions of the state’s heartbeat law. Meanwhile, pro-abortion lawmakers are proposing bills to remove currently unenforceable pro-life laws from the books.

The international pulse

Pro-life laws eroded: Last week, Zimbabwe’s High Court ruled that the law restricting abortion for minors is unconstitutional. Abortion is illegal in all cases except when the mother’s life is in danger, the child is at risk of severe physical or mental handicaps, or the pregnancy results from rape or incest. Pro-abortion activists argue that forbidding abortion in cases of rape within marriage and for girls under 18 fails to meet international standards for women’s rights. The pro-abortion group Women and Law in Southern Africa brought the case to the High Court, seeking to change the 1977 law. The group argued that prohibiting minors from aborting their babies is discriminatory because the Zimbabwe Constitution states that every person has the right “to make decisions concerning reproduction.” According to the Population Reference Bureau, 25% of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion in this southern African country. The Constitutional Court must approve the ruling before it goes into effect. —N.B.

Fighting for birth: A U.K. man has spent more than three years fighting to give his frozen embryo a chance to be born after his wife died six years ago. The couple struggled with secondary fertility after having one child together in 2010, and they turned to in vitro fertilization. In 2018, the man’s wife gave birth to one of the two babies they conceived through the process. But the other embryo was still frozen when a tragedy took the lives of both the wife and the then-11-month-old baby. A judge recently ruled in favor of the man giving the embryo a chance at birth, but commercial surrogacy is illegal in the U.K., meaning the man still has to find someone willing to volunteer to carry his baby. He said he’s always seen the embryos as “a precious life form” but had not considered the possibility of unforeseen circumstances preventing his wife from birthing them both.

Quick beats

• A federal appeals court panel ruled that Idaho’s attorney general can’t prosecute medical staff who refer women out of state for abortions.
• A California lawmaker is working on legislation that would allow the state attorney general’s office to fine cities that attempt to keep abortion facilities from opening.
• New campaign finance reports show Tesla CEO Elon Musk funded the political action committee that advertised President-elect Donald Trump as in agreement with the late pro-abortion U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the abortion issue.
• Members of the San Antonio City Council want to add funding for abortion travel to the city’s reproductive healthcare fund.
• An Idaho committee met at the end of November to review maternal deaths in the state for the first time since being disbanded in 2023. Its report is due to the legislature by Jan. 31.
• Texas Right to Life is looking for men to file lawsuits against people who help the mothers of their unborn children obtain abortions.

WORLD-wide reports

• In The Sift, Christina Grube reports on California’s efforts to “Trump-proof” its state laws in a special legislative session and covers pro-life and pro-abortion groups that vied for donations during last week’s Giving Tuesday.
• Also in The Sift, Lauren Canterberry reports on the religious groups calling on U.K. lawmakers to oppose a bill to legalize assisted suicide and the Parliament’s vote to advance the measure. She also covers the legal challenge against Missouri’s pro-life laws.
• On The World and Everything in It, Carolina Lumetta reports on one group that’s charting a path forward for how people with different viewpoints can talk about politics.
• In WORLD Opinions, Rachel Roth Aldhizer writes about how reproductive technology introduces a supposed right to be a parent and argues that substandard healthcare, not pro-life laws, is the reason for Texas’ increasing maternal mortality rate. Brad Littlejohn comments on the deadly logic of assisted suicide and R. Albert Mohler Jr. reacts to the British Parliament’s vote to legalize the practice.

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