Half of the people whose pregnancy terminations were documented in Utah’s last annual abortion report told doctors it was for socioeconomic reasons — they couldn’t afford to go through with giving birth and caring for a child. That report was for 2021, and was published by the Utah Department of Health Human Services nearly two years later.
But it’s unclear how reproductive care access has changed across Utah’s communities since abortion restrictions were triggered in 2022 by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Although the Republican-led state continues to require doctors to collect extensive data from abortion patients, which some health experts say stigmatizes and makes it more difficult to access care, Utah scaled down the abortion statistics it publishes after the policy upheaval.
“It’s a little bit the worst of all possible worlds, in that they both still have these reporting requirements in place, and they also, for all intents and purposes, seem to not be doing anything with them,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at sexual and reproductive health policy thinktank Guttmacher Institute. “But the ideal case would be for them to not have these reporting requirements at all.”
Meanwhile, abortions in Utah have risen drastically, per the limited numbers the state has published. Between 2021 to 2023, the number of abortions performed in the state rose about 30% — from 3,129 to 4,080.
Abortion remains legal in Utah, but has been restricted after 18 weeks since 2022. A blocked near-total ban, however, continues to make its way through state courts.
The data Utah collects on abortion patients
Under state law, Utah’s health agency continues to share some abortion numbers with lawmakers. Those reports include the number of abortions per fiscal year, how many individuals said they were seeking to end a pregnancy that was the result of rape and whether those patients had filed a report with police.
Utah continues to require health care providers to report on a form if there was a complication when performing an abortion, if the fetus would have been viable outside the womb and if the patient has completed a state counseling module.
The state also mandates doctors disclose the patient’s specific reason for ending their pregnancy: for a fetal abnormality, to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health, because of rape or incest, for socioeconomic reasons, if it was “elective,” among other listed purposes.
Those requirements place Utah among the states collecting the broadest amounts of data on abortion. Multiple states enforcing near-total abortion bans, including Texas and Tennessee, do not ask for as much information on abortion patients as Utah, according to a Guttmacher policy tracker.
Annual reports previously included the reasons cited for seeking an abortion, detailed demographic information and statistics on how many out-of-staters were coming to Utah for abortion care — neighboring Idaho has a near-total abortion ban, and Utah health centers are often closest geographically to rural Nevada and Wyoming residents.
With debates on GOP-proposed abortion limits looming, the 2021 report indicated that nearly half of women who sought an abortion already had children and that Utahns of color would be disproportionately impacted by an abortion ban.
When Planned Parenthood Association of Utah challenged an abortion clinic ban passed by the Legislature in 2023, which would have required that all abortion procedures take place in hospitals, the organization compared the state’s published data with its own.
It determined 95% of abortions in the state were performed in one of the four abortion clinics operating in the state at the time (one has since closed due to federal funding cuts), and cited the number when asking a judge to block the law. A district judge granted the request, and the law was later repealed.
“The data previously published by the state was unique in that it counted actual cases, not estimates, making it both more accurate and more useful for understanding the many reasons why people seek abortion care in Utah,” said Jason Stevenson, the policy director at Utah’s Planned Parenthood affiliate, in a statement.
Asked why it stopped publishing the in-depth annual reports, Danielle Conlon, a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, pointed to the quiet sunsetting of a state law requiring the creation of the reports in 2023. Lawmakers approved phasing out the mandate five years earlier in a routine bill cleaning up the health agency’s legal responsibilities.
But at the beginning of the 2021 report, published in the latter half of 2023, health officials wrote, “This law has been repealed but the office continues to provide the report to the public. The abortion report makes commonly used vital records statistics available to lawmakers, health programs, health care providers, businesses, researchers, educational institutions, and members of the public.”
Conlon said the department opted not to create reports in 2024 and 2025, for 2022 and 2023, respectively, because, “We decided to focus our resources on creating the abortion statistics dashboard instead of creating manual reports.”
That dashboard is expected to launch sometime this year, but will not include as much data as the annual reports.
Conlon said it will display “statistics summarized by live births, female population, state of residence, local health district, marital status, age, and education,” and noted the department believes a dashboard format will boost “the public’s ability to understand the statistics around abortion.”
Among the data left out are race and ethnicity, whether the person already has children and the cited reason for seeking an abortion.
Should Utah be collecting data?
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) A banner is draped over a Planned Parenthood Association of Utah location in Salt Lake City, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024. The Utah Supreme Court ruled Thursday that abortion will remain legal up to 18 weeks in Utah while the state awaits a lower court’s ruling on Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s lawsuit alleging that a near-total abortion ban is unconstitutional.
After President Donald Trump returned to office, the Guttmacher Institute urged states to consider reducing the amount of data it requires health care providers to collect from abortion patients.
It pointed to a call in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a Trump presidency, popularly known as “Project 2025,” to pressure states to share more abortion data with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The current climate has escalated the risk of mandated data collection being used to stigmatize, harass, or even prosecute abortion patients and providers — including in situations where abortion care is provided and obtained legally,” researchers wrote.
An increasing number of Democratic states have stopped or reduced abortion data collection since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling undoing the precedent protecting access to abortion as a constitutional right, citing concerns about privacy and how patients’ data could be used.
Some have decided to require health centers to report data in aggregate numbers, rather than submitting forms for individual cases. Sharing data with the CDC is currently voluntary for states.
Utah has collected and published data on abortion patients since the 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide. In 1974, the state estimated 1,584 abortions were performed (it was only able to collect data for the last nine months of the year).
“These requirements are being used to essentially stigmatize care and create administrative burdens for both providers and for patients to access care,” Maddow-Zimet said. “It’s really atypical for most other kinds of medical procedures, aside from births and deaths, which are vital statistics, for there to be these kinds of mandated state reporting requirements.”
Utah, in particular, “collects a lot of detail,” Maddow-Zimet said. Patients must fill out a two-page form that goes as far as asking which zip code they live in, and, if they are Hispanic, where their family originates from.
While the CDC’s abortion surveillance data remains online, the Trump administration has pulled other information off of the agency’s website, including guidance for safe contraception. It’s unclear whether the CDC will publish its next abortion surveillance report — for 2023 — later this fall.
Although he worries about patients’ privacy and the burden data collection presents, Maddow-Zimet added, “None of that is to say that abortion data collection isn’t important. It is tremendously important … in both showing how common it is, and also showing the ways in which the restrictions are impacting people’s ability to provide care and people’s ability to get care. ”
Guttmacher publishes its own monthly estimates of abortion numbers in each state, and so does the Society of Family Planning. That data is sourced on an aggregate level from abortion providers.
“We think that there’s a better way to collect this data without relying on legal mandates,” Maddow-Zimet said.
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