Pro-life media outlet Life News consistently downplays the number of abortions occurring in conservative states claiming to have banned the procedure, falsely asserting in several instances that some states now have zero abortions, according to an analysis by The Sentinel.

Even after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, the overall number of abortions in the United States increased to 511,000 in the first six months of 2023 from roughly 465,000 during a comparable period in 2020, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute. The analysis did not consider “abortions occurring without in-person or virtual contact with the formal health care system,” such as those who “obtain abortion pills from a community support network or websites that source pills from outside the United States.”

Aid Access, one of several foreign entities which sends abortion pills around the world, indeed said in a recent press release that more than 15,000 women from across the United States had requested pills through their service in roughly one month, including 3,500 women who live in states where abortion is purportedly banned. One study which evaluated the number of abortion pill orders from Aid Access after the overturn of Roe v. Wade found that states with purported “total bans” saw the largest increases in orders, with virtually all states seeing increased levels of demand for self-managed abortions regardless of their current laws.

Life News, which maintains more than 900,000 followers on Facebook and over 300,000 followers on Twitter, nevertheless claims in multiple articles that the conservative states with purported abortion bans now have “zero abortions.”

The outlet published an article last month entitled “Oklahoma Abortions Drop to 0 as Abortion Ban Saves Thousands of Babies,” asserting on the basis of an official state report that “abortions dropped to 0” after a new pro-life law was implemented. Oklahoma, where women quadrupled their per-capita orders from Aid Access, was nevertheless one of the states with the highest rise in abortion pill requests in the summer of 2022, according to the study.

More than half of abortions in the United States already occurred via abortion pills even before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to more data from the Guttmacher Institute. The substances are difficult to track in the mail, especially when shipped from overseas entities.

Life News also ran an article entitled “Kentucky Abortions Drop to 0, Abortion Ban Saves Hundreds of Babies,” asserting that “Kentucky abortions have dropped from hundreds per month to 0 since the August enforcement of the trigger law” passed after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The outlet also ran similar stories about South Dakota and Texas.

Another article claimed that fourteen states are now "completely abortion-free" and only clarified in the seventh paragraph that they were specifically referencing any state that does “not have any abortion facilities.” The article said in the ninth paragraph that the analysis did not include facilities operated by Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion conglomerate in the nation.

None of the aforementioned Life News articles provided context about the self-managed abortion phenomenon. Life News has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

In another article about the new data from the Guttmacher Institute, Life News likewise claimed that there are fourteen states “where babies are generally protected from abortion and where abortions have dropped to 0 or near zero.”

“Most pro-life leaders say no woman should ever be responsible for aborting her own child,” Foundation to Abolish Abortion President Bradley Pierce remarked in comments provided to The Sentinel. “So to them a state has ‘zero’ abortions when all the clinics are closed and no abortions are officially reported. Because it does not fit their narrative, they seem to be purposely ignoring the tens of thousands of children still being murdered in those states every year who are just being killed at home instead of at a clinic.”

Conservative states, many of which have indeed heavily regulated surgical abortion centers after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, forbid officials from prosecuting mothers for the murder of their preborn children, even if the mothers willfully choose to order abortion pills without assistance or coercion from any other party. Oklahoma, for example, expressly bans the “charging or conviction of a woman with any criminal offense in the death of her own unborn child,” while Tennessee makes explicit that “the pregnant woman upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted” cannot be subjected to “criminal conviction or penalty.”