Union County · ~140,413 residents
140,413
Residents
20
Legislative district
3
Legislators
1
Abortion facility
Elizabeth is the county seat of Union County and the fifth largest city in New Jersey — a port city, and a place of arrival for as long as there has been a state here.
That state was the North's slowest to abolish slavery. New Jersey freed no living person in 1804; it provided only that children born to enslaved mothers thereafter would be free at 21 or 25, which is to say after a working lifetime had already been taken. The 1846 act said to finish the job renamed the remaining enslaved as "apprentices" bound to their owners. Eighteen were still held in 1860. The legislature rejected the Thirteenth Amendment in March 1865 and ratified it in January 1866, after the amendment was already law. An abolition bill is written the way it is because of records like this one.
Union County is one of New Jersey's youngest, created out of Essex County on 19 March 1857 — four years before the Civil War, and while people were still held as apprentices for life under the 1846 act. Essex had counted 1,521 enslaved residents in 1800. Elizabeth, Union Township and Plainfield were part of that county for the whole of the slaveholding era.
Abortion reporting to the CDC is voluntary, and New Jersey is one of four jurisdictions that declines. Its own Department of Health publishes no count of induced terminations, by county or statewide. The state that wrote abortion access into its statutes does not record how often it happens.
There is no figure for Elizabeth, or for Union County, because there is no figure for anywhere in New Jersey. The best available independent estimate is 61,200 abortions provided by clinicians statewide in 2025.
Sources: CDC, Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2022 (MMWR Surveillance Summaries) · Guttmacher Institute, Monthly Abortion Provision Study
One abortion facility operates in Elizabeth, a Planned Parenthood health centre on Elizabeth Avenue:
Planned Parenthood — Elizabeth Health Center
1171 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ 07201
(833) 377-8474
Every abortion facility in New Jersey →
Elizabeth sits in Legislative District 20. Its senator and two assembly members are below, with their recorded FRCA votes.
Elizabeth is in District 20. New Jersey elects one senator and two assembly members from each district, so 3 people represent this city in Trenton.
“No recorded vote” means the member was not serving when the bill was voted on in January 10, 2022. It is not an abstention, and we do not present it as one.
Senate · District 20 · Democrat
Assembly · District 20 · Democrat
Assembly · District 20 · Democrat
Congregations we know of in Elizabeth that have taken a public abolitionist position — not simply a pro-life one.
We are not aware of a publicly abolitionist church in Elizabeth. We read every New Jersey congregation in the directory we work from — 106 of them — and found one in the whole state, in Glassboro. Abolitionists Rising, the movement's own national organisation, lists the same single church on its New Jersey page and no others. That is not a gap in the research. It is the situation.
If your church has taken a public position on abolition — from the pulpit, in a resolution, or in its own published words — tell us and we will verify it and list it here.
Elizabeth is in Legislative District 20, which elects one senator and two assembly members. All three are listed on this page with contact details and recorded FRCA vote.
No. Neither a bill of abolition nor an equal-protection bill has been introduced in the New Jersey Legislature.
The state does not say. New Jersey is one of four jurisdictions that declines to report abortion data to the CDC and publishes no count of its own. Guttmacher estimates about 61,200 in 2025.
Sign the petition, contact your three legislators, and share this page with your church.
