Passaic County · ~160,463 residents
160,463
Residents
35
Legislative district
3
Legislators
1
Abortion facility
Paterson is New Jersey's third largest city and sits in Passaic County, in the north of a state that took sixty years to stop holding people as property. It is a working city, and has been since it was founded as one.
New Jersey was the last northern state to free its slaves, and it did it by degrees. The 1804 Gradual Abolition Act freed no one then alive — it provided that children born to enslaved mothers afterwards would go free at 21 if they were women and 25 if they were men. In 1846 a second act said to abolish slavery converted those still held into "apprentices" bound to their present owners. Eighteen people remained enslaved in this state in 1860, and in March 1865 the legislature voted against the Thirteenth Amendment. Each delay had its defenders, and each was called realism.
Passaic County was created on 7 February 1837 from parts of Bergen and Essex. Those were the first and sixth counties in New Jersey by enslaved population in 1800 — Bergen with 2,825 people held, Essex with 1,521. Paterson, Clifton, Passaic and Wayne were inside them.
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 Paterson, or for Passaic 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 Paterson, a Planned Parenthood centre on Broadway:
Planned Parenthood — Paterson Center
680 Broadway, Paterson, NJ 07514
(973) 345-3883
Every abortion facility in New Jersey →
Paterson sits entirely within Legislative District 35. Its senator and two assembly members are listed below with their recorded votes on the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act.
Paterson is in District 35. 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 35 · Democrat
Assembly · District 35 · Democrat
Assembly · District 35 · Democrat
Congregations we know of in Paterson that have taken a public abolitionist position — not simply a pro-life one.
We are not aware of a publicly abolitionist church in Paterson. 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.
Paterson is in Legislative District 35, which elects one senator and two assembly members. All three are listed on this page.
None that we know of. The church directory we work from holds no Paterson congregation that has taken a public abolitionist position. If yours has, tell us and we will list it.
New Jersey does not report it. The state 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 abortions provided by clinicians in New Jersey in 2025.
The immediate and total end of abortion, criminalised as homicide, with no exceptions, from fertilisation.
