NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio Executive Director Kellie Copeland said many Ohio residents have traveled to Michigan for abortion care in the aftermath of the GOP-led legislature's anti-choice push.

NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio responded to the data in a statement and attributed the recent decline to “bad restrictions and good contraceptives.” Gov. John Kasich (R) and the state's GOP legislators have overseen the closure of half of Ohio's abortion clinics.

Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images

The number of abortion care procedures in Ohio dropped by 1 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to the latest set of statistics released Friday by the Ohio Department of Health.

The total number of induced abortions in Ohio dropped from 21,186 in 2014 to 20,976 in 2015, according according to the report, which noted that the recent drop followed a steady decline in abortions over the past decade and a half.

NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio responded to the data in a statement and attributed the recent decline to “bad restrictions and good contraceptives.” Gov. John Kasich (R) and the state’s GOP legislators have overseen the closure of half of Ohio’s abortion clinics.

A similar trend in abortion rates has been documented in Texas after the passing of the omnibus anti-abortion known as HB 2. In July, the Texas Department of State Health Services released 2014 abortion statistics, revealing a decrease in the number of abortions in the state compared to the previous year. The total number of abortions in Texas dropped from 63,849 in 2013 to 54,902 in 2014.

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Ohio’s Republican-held legislature has passed or has attempted to pass a number of anti-choice targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws since Kasich took office in 2011.

Ohio lawmakers in 2013 passed HB 59, an omnibus budget bill that included a medically dubious fetal heartbeat ban, a provision that redirects money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to anti-choice fake clinics, often called crisis pregnancy centers, and a provision that sought to restrict funding to the state’s Planned Parenthood facilities, among other anti-choice provisions.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine (R) recently relied upon a now-blocked local hospital admitting privileges law after he appealed to the state’s Supreme Court to close Toledo’s last standing abortion clinic.

NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio Executive Director Kellie Copeland said in a statement that many Ohio residents have traveled to Michigan for abortion care in the aftermath of the GOP-led legislature’s anti-choice push.

“This trend should send a clear message to Ohio legislators and Gov. Kasich: these restrictions are not improving the health of women. Period,” Copeland said.

NARAL noted the statistical connection to a research study released in August by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journal.

The study found that the state’s medication abortion protocol led to a “greater need for additional intervention, more visits, more side effects, and higher costs for women.”

The state’s medication abortion requirements, signed into law in 2004 and effective beginning in 2011 after years of legal challenges, required physicians to prescribe mifepristone at a dosage level set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol. NARAL noted that level represented three times that dosage prescribed by doctors in other states.

Copeland likened the medication requirements to legislators demanding a root canal for a cavity.

“That level of political interference was exactly what was happening in Ohio from 2011 to 2015 as state politicians forced abortion providers to use three times the dose of medication during abortions,” she said.

Ohio public health officials have tracked induced abortion statistics since 1976, according to the report. The data set revealed that more than half of induced abortions involved pregnancies of less than nine weeks. Women between the ages of 20-29 made up 61.1 percent of the terminations in Ohio last year, according to the report.

The annual decline in abortion procedures from 2001 to 2015 averaged about 930 per year, according to the state health department.