At least 58 abortion clinics, or nearly one in 10, have shut down or stopped providing abortions since 2011, Bloomberg News reports.
The closures come due to regulations, which have made clinics too expensive to maintain, doctor retirements, and changing demographics.
Pro-life activists and legislatures are making more progress than ever in decreasing the number of abortions in the United States, according to Bloomberg.
Clinics, not doctors’ offices or hospitals, are where most women go to terminate pregnancies. The ranks of the facilities have been thinning since the late 1980s, when the number of large nonhospital providers -- those performing 400 or more abortions per year -- peaked at 705, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based reproductive-health research organization. By 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, that number had fallen to 591.
The pace began accelerating in 2011. Since then, through Aug. 1 of this year, state lawmakers passed 200 abortion restrictions, according to Guttmacher. That’s about the same number that had passed in the prior 10 years combined.
