Abortion rate in the US at all-time low; teens, women below 30 show lower pregnancy rates: CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a drop in the rate of abortion in the U.S. by as much as 35 percent between 1990 and 2010.

According to the government agency, they expect the trend to continue in the coming years. The 2010 abortion rate fell to 17.7 percent, which was already considered an all-time low. A couple of decades ago, the number of abortion cases was at 1.6 million, but in 2010, the number declined by about half a million.

Sally Curtin, report lead author and a statistician for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, said that it was the lowest abortion rate ever recorded since the CDC began tracking the procedure in 1976. She added that it has been on a nearly steady decline since the rate peaked in 1980, CBS News reported.

Meanwhile, the report also showed that the pregnancy rate was also seen to be at a steady decline in 2010. "The pregnancy rate for women in the United States continued to decline in 2010, to 98.7 per 1,000 women aged 15-44, a record low for the 1976-2010 period," wrote Curtin, together with fellow researchers Joyce Abma of the NCHS and Kathryn Kost of the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health think tank.

"This level was 15 percent below the 1990 peak. The estimated number of pregnancies dropped to 6.155 million in 2010, the lowest number since 1986," they added.

The data from the CDC also noted that the pregnancy rate for women under 30 has also been on a steady decline since 1990, while the rate of pregnancies was cut to about 50 percent among teens aged 15 to 19. The largest percent decline was seen among those teens who are aged 14 and below at 67 percent.

Kost said that this drop in numbers for both pregnancies and abortion could be attributed to a rise in the use of birth control. She said that because fewer women are getting pregnant when they don't want to, the rate of unintended pregnancy is going down across the country.

According to a report from NBC News, the Guttmacher researchers also found that almost 50 percent of the pregnancy cases in the U.S. are unintended and that teenagers do not use the most effective methods of birth control. Federal data also reveal that the birth rate among teens in the country is still seven times higher compared to the numbers from other wealthy countries.