Reported abortions decline slightly but remain high in wake of sweeping policy changes

January 5, 2026 | Press Release

ST. PAUL —  Abortions declined slightly in 2024 but have risen 35 percent since 2021, according to a corrected-but-still-incomplete report from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). MDH has revised its original Dec. 31 report after mistakenly double-counting more than 2,500 abortions. According to the new data, last year’s abortion total of 13,729 marked a nearly 7 percent drop, but it excludes several hundred abortions from one longstanding facility that was active during 2024. The gestational age of many abortions was not reported as required.

"The surge in abortions in recent years, and the major reporting failures, are a reminder that DFL lawmakers have made Minnesota an extreme outlier—in the region, in the country, and in the world," said MCCL Co-Executive Director Cathy Blaeser. "Following the 2022 elections, they legalized abortion for any reason and at any time throughout pregnancy. They revoked protection for born-alive infants. They got rid of a program supporting pregnant women and new mothers as well as a law ensuring informed consent prior to abortion. They also repealed many parts of Minnesota's abortion reporting law, including data on reasons for abortion and prior abortions—information that helps root out instances of trafficking. There's now less support and empowerment for pregnant women and less protection for vulnerable women and children. It's time to restore commonsense policies in our state."

The increase over the last few years defies a long-term downward trajectory that had seen abortions drop 48 percent from 1980 to 2015. The 2024 total is the second highest in Minnesota since 2007—behind only 2023's two-decade high. About 2,750 abortions took place on non-Minnesota residents (a reduction from the previous year), according to MDH; most of these were residents of surrounding states. Abortions on Minnesota residents dropped 5 percent.

Notably, Robbinsdale Clinic, which closed in early 2025 but performed abortions throughout 2024, is not listed in the new report; the center's former director says it performed about 750 abortions in 2024, all of them missing from the MDH data. In addition, the gestational age of nearly 1,000 abortions was not reported, a sharp departure from previous years (that figure is a 337 percent increase over the previous year and a 1,332 percent jump since 2022). Nevertheless, a total of 314 abortions were reported at 20 weeks' gestation or later, with two reported in the third trimester.

Among abortion facilities, Planned Parenthood performed a record-high 8,052 abortions in 2024, while practitioners like Just the Pill and Carafem, which send chemical abortion drugs through the mail, accounted for a significant portion; 1,641 abortions were classified as “telehealth.”

In 2023, lawmakers changed parts of Minnesota’s abortion reporting law, delaying the release date of the annual MDH report to Dec. 31 and repealing certain reporting requirements. As a result, the report does not include post-operative abortion complications or the reasons behind abortion. Nor does it report cases of infants who survive abortion and the care they receive. Lawmakers in 2023 also gutted a law requiring that medically appropriate measures be taken to save the lives of such infants.