Abortion Rate Changes: What do the Statistics Show?

Are the recent claims that abortion declines have stalled or reversed during the Bush administration's years based on bad statistics?  Pro-life liberal Glen Stassen originally wrote the articles (for example this one) proposing, based on data from 16 states, that abortions had begun to increase during the Bush years after declining during the Clinton years.  More complete statistics from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, based on 44 states, now indicate that "abortion rates continued to decline in 2001 and 2002, although the rate of decline has slowed since the early 1990s."  But Stassen responds that even if there has been some continued decline, nevertheless "the dramatic decline in number of abortions of the '90s to 300,000 fewer abortions per year has now stalled almost to a stop."  The emerging consensus seems to be that there has been a statistically significant slowdown in the decline of abortion rates; how much the decline has slowed is a matter of debate, based in part on how one interprets the statistical margins of error.

Tom B.