Are Americans fleeing states that ban or restrict abortion?

Spoiler alert: no, they're not.

Photo by Elyssa DeDios on Unsplash

In the days leading up to the 2024 election, the pro-abortion lobby and the politicians and media representatives that peddle their agenda to the masses worked very hard to convince us that abortion was a critically important issue to Americans.

We were told that women would be fleeing anti-abortion states, headed to the safe haven of states were the so-called “right” to poison and dismember unborn children in the womb was protected.

So, there was a big media frenzy recently when a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) indicated that people are moving away from states where most unborn children are protected.

As LifeNews reports, the NBER examined change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service to draw the conclusion that an estimated 36,000 people had moved out of these states since Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Is this data we can trust?

According to LifeNews, not so much.

“Not surprisingly, there is less here than meets the eye,” they explain. “Change-of-address data might not be the most accurate way to measure interstate migration. That is because not everyone who moves files a change-of-address card. Furthermore, for privacy reasons, the U.S. Postal Service discloses only aggregate change-of-address data for ZIP codes where more than ten people reported a change of address. Given that, there might be a problem with missing data.”

“The study also assumes that 13 states that effectively banned abortion all did so shortly after Dobbs, but some pro-life laws did not take effect until months afterward,” the pro-life platform continues, adding that “the NBER study considers data only until the second quarter of 2023, and so considers no data from either 2024 or the last six months of 2023.”

Meanwhile, data from the US Census Bureau paint a very different picture.

In fact, 13 out of the 16 states that either fully protect the unborn or have heartbeat bills in place saw population increases in fiscal year 2024. Only Louisiana and Mississippi saw population drops due to interstate migration.

On the other hand, several very pro-abortion states also saw population drops due to interstate migration, such as California, New York, and Illinois.

LifeNews notes that despite the best efforts on the part of pro-aborts to present evidence of the negative impact of pro-life laws, they keep coming up short. Infant mortality rates have dropped since Roe was overturned, for example.

There will never be any amount of data that can prove that protecting women and children from abortion is good for anyone, since abortion always ends a human life.

Even if states with anti-abortion laws saw significant population decreases, abortion would still be wrong. We’re just happy to see that so many Americans embrace and support laws that protect the unborn. The culture is truly changing!