International Women’s Day highlights need for continued legal reform to improve real-world access to care

GENEVA, 8 March 2026—International Women’s Day provides an opportunity to reflect on advances in gender equality and women’s rights, as well as the challenges that remain. On this occasion, the Center for Reproductive Rights in Europe is highlighting the significant advances made in abortion law and policy across Europe, while underscoring remaining barriers that continue to prevent many women from accessing essential reproductive healthcare in practice.

Europe’s abortion laws have evolved significantly over recent decades, with almost all countries now allowing abortion on request at least in early pregnancy. In the past decade, more than 20 countries have introduced reforms to expand access by removing harmful procedural barriers and repealing restrictive provisions. Today, highly restrictive laws, like those in Poland, represent exceptions to the regional norm.

Momentum for reform continues to grow. Recent examples include Switzerland making abortion care fully free of charge from 2027, Luxembourg abolishing a mandatory three-day waiting period, and Denmark and Norway extending the time limit for abortion on request to 18 weeks. At the European Union level, the European Commission’s response to the My Voice, My Choice European Citizens’ Initiative marked an important development, with the Commission recognising that the EU can play a role in supporting access to abortion care across the European Union.

Efforts to strengthen legal protections are also advancing. On 3 March, Luxembourg lawmakers voted to enshrine the freedom to have an abortion in the country’s constitution, making it the second country in the world to protect women’s reproductive rights at the constitutional level, following France in 2024. Similar efforts to enshrine reproductive rights in national constitutions are currently under discussion in several other European countries.

Despite this progress, legal and policy barriers that delay access to care persist across the region. Restrictive time limits, mandatory waiting periods, biased counselling requirements and high out-of-pocket costs continue to delay or obstruct access to abortion care. Residual criminal laws that criminalise abortion outside of legal pathways remain in place in many countries, and although prosecutions are rare, such frameworks are out of date and have no place in regulating access to essential healthcare. The World Health Organization specifies in its guidelines that abortion care should be fully decriminalised and removed from the criminal law. Today, 29 European countries no longer criminalise women who access abortion care outside the scope of the law, reflecting a growing regional trend towards decriminalisation. However, 20 countries, including Switzerland and Germany, still criminalise women who seek care outside of legal pathways. 

In four European countries — Albania, Hungary, the Netherlands and Switzerland — access to abortion on request remains conditioned on a requirement to formally declare distress, an antiquated approach undermining women’s decision-making.  In recent years, other countries, such as Belgium and France, have removed these old-fashioned legal requirements.

“Europe has made remarkable progress recently in strengthening legal protections for abortion,” said Leah Hoctor, Vice President for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “But there are important reforms to be made in every country in the region. International Women’s Day is an important moment for governments and lawmakers to look at the evidence and data, take stock of how their own country’s laws and policies treat this form of essential healthcare, and act to address remaining barriers.”