The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been tracking abortion trends for decades, but this year’s report — including some of the earliest federal data reflecting the effect of significant changes to abortion access nationwide – has been pushed back until spring amid turmoil at the federal agency. Each year, states and jurisdictions voluntarily report data that they’ve collected to the CDC for a national analysis, a process that has been happening in some form since 1969. The CDC compiles that information into a report that’s typically published in late November. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services blames former CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry for the delay of this year’s abortion surveillance report, saying in a statement that Houry “directed staff to return state-submitted abortion data rather than analyze it.” Houry denies this claim, instead saying that major layoffs at HHS this year left the CDC without the staff it needed to do the work. After thousands of people were laid off from HHS in April, Houry says, she helped lead a transition management team that developed agency-wide approaches to manage the effects of the layoffs, including coordinated communication. At that time, she says, the agency had also implemented a policy in which all external communication — including to partners at state and local health departments — had to be approved by a communications office led by politically appointed staff during the initial weeks after the layoffs. “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,” she 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.” An HHS official told CNN that Houry did not follow this process of checking with political appointees or other agency leadership before shutting down the abortion surveillance data project, but HHS didn’t respond to a request for details about how or when it heard about the supposed action by Houry. Houry was one of several high-level veteran agency officials who resigned in protest in August after CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez was fired just weeks after she had been sworn in to the position. The exiting leaders described censorship, communication failures and the weaponization of public health by HHS in resignation letters, social media posts and statements from attorneys. The delayed CDC abortion surveillance report is expected to include data through 2023, the first full year after the U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion. Researchers outside the federal government have also started tracking abortion trends in the U.S. in the past few years, and a new #WeCount report sponsored by the Society of Family Planning shows that the number of abortions provided in the U.S. has continued to increase post-Dobbs. There were an average of nearly 99,000 abortions each month in the first half of 2025, up about four per cent from the monthly average last year, according to the report, which was published Tuesday. Most abortions in the U.S. still happen in person, but the latest #WeCount data shows that medication abortions provided through telehealth account for all of the increase so far this year. In the first half of 2025, 27 per cent of all abortions within the U.S. health care system were provided via telehealth, up from less than 10 per cent in the first half of 2023. More than half of the telehealth abortions in the U.S. are now provided under shield laws, which offer some legal protections for providers who practice in some states where abortion remains legal to prescribe medication abortion drugs via telehealth to people living in states with bans or restrictions. In June, nearly 15,000 abortions were provided under shield laws in the U.S., #WeCount data shows. “Abortion bans don’t stop people from needing and pursuing essential abortion care,” Dr. Alison Norris, co-chair of the #WeCount research project and professor at The Ohio State University’s College of Public Health, said in a statement. “Telehealth is helping people in states with bans to access abortion care – and yet it isn’t the answer for everyone. Abortion bans are causing harm, and all too often, your access to healthcare depends on where you live and how much money you have.” Although abortion surveillance data from the CDC is a bit older than data reported by #WeCount and other research organizations like the Guttmacher Institute, experts say it still adds critical pieces to the overall picture. “I thought the CDC data set was helpful because it came from health departments, it was anonymized, and it used the same questions year after year, so it’s able to track trends over a long period of time,” Houry said. But layoffs left the department without the subject-matter experts who understand the nuances of the project. “It’s really hard to replace people,” she said. “This is the thing that’s happening for any programs that don’t have funding or staff, because I don’t know how you do work if you don’t have funding or staff.” --- By Deidre McPhillips, CNN
