As World Eases Restrictions on Abortion, U.S. Becomes More Restrictive, Study Finds

Since 1995, 15 countries have passed laws making abortion legal under more circumstances, while only five-including the United States-have taken steps to make abortion illegal or more difficult for women to obtain. According to a new study published by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Abortion and the Law: Ten Years of Reform, these findings point to a global trend of governments removing legal barriers to abortion.

“It is heartening to see that over a dozen governments worldwide have taken concrete actions to give women more power to make crucial decisions about their health and well-being. At the same time, it is demoralizing to measure the rest of the world’s progress against the backsliding of the U.S. government,” said Nancy Northup, President of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Ten years ago, 189 countries, including the U.S., adopted the Beijing Platform to achieve women’s equality. The international declaration called on governments to deal with unsafe abortions as a major public health concern and to reconsider their laws that punish women for having illegal abortions. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 20 million women around the world have unsafe abortions every year and nearly 70,000 die as a result.

Since the adoption of the Beijing Platform, fifteen countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America have eased restrictions on abortion. Here are examples:

• Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea and Mali have gone from being among the countries with the most restrictive abortion laws to recognizing such grounds for abortion as saving a woman’s life and protecting her health in cases of rape, incest, and fetal impairment.


• ,Nepal prohibited abortion altogether until 2002, when the procedure was made legal without restriction during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and thereafter to protect a woman’s health.


• Switzerland, which had one of the more restrictive abortion laws in Europe, also passed a similar law to Nepal’s in 2002.

Only a handful of countries have passed laws restricting abortion. Here are examples:

• El Salvador, in 1998, amended its laws to make abortion illegal without any exceptions. Under previous law, abortion was permitted only to save a woman’s life and in cases of rape and fetal impairment.


• The U.S. adopted the first-ever federal ban on abortion entitled the “Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003.” The ban outlaws a range of the safest and most common abortions, performed as early as 12 weeks and fails to provide any exception if a woman’s health is at stake. Enforcement of the law has been blocked by three federal courts. Here is the breakdown of the abortion law reforms made since 1995:


• Liberalizations in Abortion Law: Albania, Australia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chad, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Guinea, Mali, Mexico, Nepal, South Africa, and Switzerland.


• Restrictions in Abortion Law: El Salvador, Hungary, Poland, Russian Federation, and the United States.

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