Shh! The political left doesn't want you to know, but abortions fell another 2 percent in the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Due to the time its takes scientists to collect and assess patterns from each state, the numbers are from 2015, but they reflect a 24 percent drop since 2006 and a drop in every year but three since 1990.
The political left has made the laughable term "women's health" (read: access to abortion) a major plank in recent elections, especially 2016 and 2018, claiming Republicans want to deny access to a medical procedure that is already a law that eliminates a child in the womb.
The argument also was front and center in the fight to approve the United States Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh earlier this year. Democrats and Planned Parenthood dumped untold amounts of time and money in the effort to defeat him, eventually digging up women who would testify to things they said he did three decades ago that in some cases were patently untrue and in other cases could not be corroborated.
In the November midterms, only one incumbent Republican U.S. senator running for re-election who voted to confirm the justice lost, but four incumbent Democrat senators running for re-election who voted to oppose him lost.
Many of those races, experts said, turned on the senators' opposition to Kavanaugh, while the issue was not thought to have much effect on the race in which the Republican lost.
The number of abortions reported to the CDC hit its high in 1990 - 17 years after the abortion-allowing Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision - with 1,429,247 but has fallen since under two Republican presidents and two Democratic presidents to 638,169 in 2015.
The left apparently still fails to understand that it's not access to abortions that is causing the number to drop but the lack of desire and the lack of need for them.
Studies have found that women, and especially teens, are using more effective birth control, are less likely to get pregnant (unintended pregnancies dropped 6 percent from 2008 to 2011-2013) and are more likely to delay sex.
Indeed, according to the CDC in its annual study, "Abortion Surveillance - United States 2015," released the day before Thanksgiving (when news organizations are looking elsewhere for stories), abortions by teenage girls have dropped 41 percent since 2006.
The drop in U.S. abortions mirrors that across the world, according to the U.S.-based Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and advocacy group. In developed countries, it has noted, abortions have dropped dramatically over the past 25 years.
In the U.S., according to the report, not only did the total number of abortions reported decrease, but so did the total number of abortions in the population (from 12.1 to 11.8 per 1,000 women ages 15-44) and the proportion of all pregnancies that end in abortion rather than birth (192 to 188 abortions per 1,000 live births).
Technology also has given women the ability to see a fetal heartbeat at an early age of development, to have surgery on babies in the womb to correct problems and to have babies survive at an earlier and earlier stage of development.
CDC statistics also revealed 60 percent of all women who had abortions had previously given birth (14 percent three or more times), 44 percent had a previous abortion (8 percent three or more), 85.7 percent of abortions were performed on unmarried women, 38 of 46 reporting states saw abortion numbers decline in 2014-2015, and women in their 20s accounted for nearly 60 percent of all abortions.
Non-Hispanic white women narrowly edged out non-Hispanic black women in accounting for the largest percentage of abortions in 2015, 36.9 percent to 36 percent.
In addition - talk about women's health - the latest data from the agency noted that six women died after complications from abortions, all legal abortions.
Since some 60 million abortions have been performed since the Roe v. Wade decision, and since a 2017 analysis in the American Journal of Public Health predicted nearly one in four women between the ages of 15 and 44 years old in 2014 would have had an abortion by age 45, the pro-life movement's heart change efforts still have a way to go.
Nevertheless, realistic, not one-sided, educational information on birth control should continue, and the debate on the way to keep the price of contraception low for all individuals should be ongoing.
But the recently released statistics can and should hearten those who believe abortion is an ongoing tragedy that can and should be stemmed.