Alabama reports just three abortions in 2025

Only three abortions occurred in the US state of Alabama last year, new data has shown.

Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) also reported a fall in the number of residents travelling to have abortions elsewhere, from 2,970 women in 2024, to 1,830 in 2025.

In 2021, the last full year before the pro-life state effectively banned the practice, there were 8,294 abortions in Alabama. Now, abortion is banned from conception unless it is to prevent serious physical risk to the mother or if the baby is expected to die in the womb.

‘Sanctity of unborn life’

Alabama’s constitution declares that the “state acknowledges, declares, and affirms that it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life”.

It adds: “Nothing in this constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”

The US state is one of 13 to ban most abortions from conception, while five have ‘heartbeat laws’ to protect unborn babies from around six weeks.

Embryos are legally children

In 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, and that anyone who destroys one could be held legally accountable. The ruling came in relation to a case brought by three couples whose embryos were accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic.

The couples sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Association, but their original claim was dismissed by a lower court which said the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act only applied to foetuses inside the womb, not embryos outside of it.

Overturning the earlier decision, Justice Mitchell determined that unborn children “are ‘children’ under the Act, without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics”.

Then Chief Justice Tom Parker explained that Alabama’s constitution recognises that “that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory”.