The Guttmacher Institute reported this week that 1.1 million abortions took place in the United States in 2025 — unchanged from 2024. The laws changed. The number didn't. That gap tells us something important about where the real work is.
The number is 1,126,000.
That is the estimated number of abortions performed by clinicians in the United States in 2025, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute — pretty much unchanged from 2024. NPR
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, more than two dozen states have enacted significant restrictions or outright bans on abortion. Courts have been contested. Laws have been challenged and defended. And through all of it, the number has not moved.
A key way that abortions are now happening despite state restrictions is through telemedicine. The FDA under President Biden allowed mifepristone to be prescribed without an in-person appointment, and states that permit abortion passed shield laws protecting providers who prescribe to patients in states with bans. NPR
In Louisiana, where abortion is banned, roughly 2,500 abortions occurred in 2023. Last year there were more than 9,000. Overall, 91,000 patients in states with bans received telehealth abortions in 2025. NPR A federal judge is expected to rule soon on Louisiana v. FDA, which could affect the telemedicine rules. Whatever that ruling says, the infrastructure is in place.
The Guttmacher report is being covered primarily as a story about the limits of legal strategy. That framing is accurate, as far as it goes. The laws changed the landscape. They did not change the number.
But the deeper story is not about law. It is about culture.
Law is downstream of culture — not the other way around. What a society permits, normalizes, and does not actively resist with its deepest convictions will persist regardless of what is written in its statutes. The past three years have produced an enormous amount of legal activity on abortion and almost no measurable change in the practice of it. That is a diagnostic, not just a political data point.
The question the number raises is not primarily a legal one. It is a cultural one: what has actually changed in the way American society understands the value of human life, the meaning of pregnancy, and the responsibility that comes with it? The answer, if the data is to be believed, is: not much.
There is a long tradition in moral reasoning — as old as the Hebrew prophets and as recent as the civil rights movement — of distinguishing between legal compliance and genuine moral transformation. Laws matter. They shape behavior, signal norms, and protect the vulnerable. But they do not, by themselves, change hearts.
The abolition of slavery required a constitutional amendment and a war. It took another century of sustained moral witness, community formation, and cultural pressure before the legal gains of the Civil Rights Act became something closer to genuine cultural change — and that work is still unfinished. The lesson is not that law is useless. It is that law without formation produces compliance at best, and evasion at worst.
1.1 million is not a legal problem that better legislation will solve. It is a formation problem. It is the number produced by a culture that has not yet been persuaded, at a deep enough level, that every life conceived is worth protecting.
That persuasion does not happen in courtrooms. It happens in the places where culture is actually made — in homes, congregations, communities, and the personal witness of people whose lives make the case that every human being, at every stage, carries irreducible worth.
There is an understandable temptation, when confronted with a number like 1.1 million, to direct energy toward the legal and political arena — because that is where the debate has been loudest.
But the number itself suggests that legal energy, while necessary, is not sufficient. The culture that produces 1.1 million abortions per year is not going to be argued out of it by court decisions. It is going to be changed by people who offer something real in its place — who build the support structures, the communities, the relationships, and the moral formation that make a different choice not just legal but thinkable, desirable, and well-supported.
The question is not what the courts will do next. It is what the people who believe every life matters will do — in their communities, their congregations, their relationships, and their spheres of influence — to make that belief visible, credible, and present in the lives of people making decisions under pressure.
The number will not change until the culture does. And the culture will not change until the people who hold a different conviction decide to build something, not just argue something.
Learn more about The Guardians' Cross → theguardianscross.org
