Essex County · ~317,303 residents
317,303
Residents
28, 29
Legislative districts
6
Legislators
2
Abortion facilities
Newark is the largest city in New Jersey, and it grew up in a county that held people as property. The 1800 federal census counted 1,719 Black residents of Essex County, of whom 1,521 were enslaved — nearly nine in ten. The commercial centre this city became was built while that was the ordinary arrangement of local life.
New Jersey did not refuse to end slavery. It ended it gradually. The 1804 act freed nobody living: it provided only that children born to enslaved mothers after that July would go free — women at 21, men at 25 — so a child born in Newark in the summer of 1804 still owed a quarter century of unpaid work before the law would let them go. In 1846 the state passed another act said to abolish slavery, which in fact renamed the enslaved "apprentices" bound to their present owners. Eighteen people were still held in New Jersey in 1860. That is what gradual abolition looks like from the inside, and it is why an abolition bill has to end the thing outright.
Essex County counted 1,719 Black residents in 1800, of whom 1,521 were enslaved. The county that would become the state's industrial and commercial centre built that position while holding people as property.
Source: 1800 federal census, as compiled by the New Jersey Slavery Records project
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 Newark, or for Essex 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
Two abortion facilities operate inside Newark city limits, both run by Planned Parenthood — one in the Ironbound and one on Mulberry Street downtown:
Planned Parenthood — Ironbound Health Center
70 Adams St, Suite 13, Newark, NJ 07105
(973) 465-7707
Planned Parenthood — Mulberry Health Center
240 Mulberry Street, Floor 1, Newark, NJ 07102
(973) 622-3900
Every abortion facility in New Jersey →
Newark is large enough to be split across two legislative districts, one of only two municipalities in the state that are. The senators and assembly members below represent this city in Trenton, and their recorded votes on the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act are shown as cast.
Newark is in Districts 28 and 29. New Jersey elects one senator and two assembly members from each district, so 6 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 28 · Democrat
Assembly · District 28 · Democrat
Assembly · District 28 · Democrat
Senate · District 29 · Democrat
Assembly · District 29 · Democrat
Assembly · District 29 · Democrat
Congregations we know of in Newark that have taken a public abolitionist position — not simply a pro-life one.
We are not aware of a publicly abolitionist church in Newark. 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.
Garden State Abolitionists covers Newark along with the rest of New Jersey. There is no separate Newark-only group. Contact us if you would like to help start local work here.
Newark is split between Legislative Districts 28 and 29. New Jersey elects one senator and two assembly members from each district, so the city is represented by six people in total. They are listed on this page with their contact details and their recorded vote on the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act.
Nobody can tell you exactly, because New Jersey does not report the number. Abortion reporting to the CDC is voluntary and New Jersey is one of four jurisdictions that declines, and the state Department of Health publishes no count of its own at any level. The best available independent estimate is the Guttmacher Institute's: about 61,200 abortions provided by clinicians in New Jersey in 2025.
Abolition means the immediate and total end of abortion, criminalised as homicide, with no exceptions, from the moment of fertilisation. That is different from the mainstream pro-life position, which accepts exceptions and pursues abortion's reduction by degrees. See What we believe for the case.
