What Other Countries Have Legal Abortions

The World Map of Abortion Laws is the definitive record of the legal status of abortion in countries around the world. Since 1998, the Center for Reproductive Rights has created this map as a resource for advocates, government officials, and civil society organizations working to promote abortion rights as human rights for women and girls* around the world. The map categorizes the legal status of abortion along a continuum from strict restriction to relative liberality. It is updated in real time and reflects changes in national laws, allowing human rights defenders to monitor how countries protect or deny reproductive rights around the world. Here are some key facts about abortion laws in other countries, based on information from the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Guttmacher Institute, the World Health Organization, and Reuters. El Salvador is one of only two countries to have introduced new restrictions on abortion since the 1994 Cairo Declaration, which recognized reproductive health as essential to development. (The other is Nicaragua.) When revising the penal code after a devastating thirteen-year civil war, El Salvador amended its abortion law, which already banned the procedure in most cases, to eliminate all exceptions, imposing a blanket ban. Although a handful of other countries have equally restrictive abortion laws, El Salvador is unique in the severity of its enforcement: doctors are required to report suspicious abortions, and there is even a special department of the prosecutor`s office tasked with investigating. Between 2000 and 2011, more than 129 women were prosecuted on suspicion of abortion, and at least 13 remain in prison, some serving decades of prison sentences. In the first half of the 20th century, many countries began to liberalize abortion laws, at least when they are applied to protect women`s lives and, in some cases, at the woman`s request. Under Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union was the first modern state to legalize abortion on demand – the law was first introduced in 1920 in the Russian SFSR, in July 1921 in the Ukrainian SSR, and then throughout the country. [5] [6] The Bolsheviks regarded abortion as a social evil created by the capitalist system, which left women without the economic means to raise their children and forced them to perform abortions. The Soviet state initially maintained the Tsarist ban on abortion, which treated the practice as premeditated murder.

However, abortion has been performed by Russian women for decades and its incidence has continued to rise due to the Russian Civil War, which has devastated the country economically and made it extremely difficult for many people to have children. The Soviet state realized that a ban on abortion would not stop the practice because women would continue to use the services of private opponents of abortion. In rural areas, these were often elderly women with no medical training, making their services very dangerous for women`s health. In November 1920, the Soviet regime legalized abortion in public hospitals. The state saw abortion as a temporary necessary evil that would disappear in the future communist society, which would be able to take care of all conceived children. [7] [page needed] In 1936, Joseph Stalin imposed abortion bans that limited them to medically recommended cases only in order to increase population growth after the enormous loss of life in World War I and the Russian Civil War. [8] [9] [6] In the 1930s, several countries (Poland, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Mexico) legalized abortion in certain special cases (pregnancy following rape, endangerment of maternal health, fetal malformation). In Japan, abortion was legalized in 1948 by the Eugenics Protection Law,[10] which was amended in May 1949 to allow abortion for economic reasons. [11] Abortion was legalized in Yugoslavia in 1952 (to some extent) and in 1955 in the Soviet Union upon request. Some Soviet allies (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania) legalized abortion in the late 1950s under pressure from the Soviets.

[How?] [12] 576 million (36%) of women of reproductive age live in countries that allow abortion on demand. 75 countries in the world fall into this category. If a country has legalized, banned and relegalized abortion on demand (e.g. former Soviet Union, Romania), only the last year is considered. Countries from the association of states where abortion was legal on demand at the time of unification indicate the year in which it became legal throughout the national territory (e.g. Germany, Vietnam). Similarly, countries where not all sub-national jurisdictions have legalized abortion on demand are not included (e.g., resulting in the exclusion of Australia, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States). Countries are counted, even if they were not yet independent at that time. The year refers to the date of entry into force of the law or court decision in question, which may differ from the year in which it was approved. But Canadian lawmakers have made only two attempts since 1988 to pass laws restricting the process, both of which failed in the years since the court`s decision in Parliament. Controversies about the onset of pregnancy occur in various contexts, especially in the legal context, and are discussed especially in the abortion debate from the perspective of measuring the gestational age of pregnancy. Pregnancy can be measured at a number of appropriate points, including the day of the last menstrual period, ovulation, fertilization, implantation, and chemical detection.

A common medical method for calculating gestational age is to measure pregnancy from the first day of the last menstrual cycle. [fd] However, not all jurisdictions use this measure for the purposes of abortion law; For example, countries such as Belgium, France and Luxembourg use the term “pregnancy” in abortion law to refer to the time that has elapsed since the sexual act that led to conception, which would be 2 weeks after the end of the last menstrual period. [fe] While cost and accessibility for many Americans eliminate the ability to travel abroad for abortions, there is interest. Internet inquiries such as “Is abortion legal in Canada?” and “List of countries where abortion is illegal” surged this week. Abortion was permanently legalized in the United States by the Supreme Court`s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. However, each state has its own legal guidelines for abortion, some being much more restrictive than others. In fact, prior to Row v Wade, 30 states had completely banned abortion, and while all 50 states complied with the federal decision to decriminalize abortion, many passed laws restricting abortion as much as the law allows. The following table lists, in chronological order, the member states of the United Nations that have legalized abortion on demand at least in the first part of pregnancy or that have completely decriminalized abortion. As of July 2022, 65 countries have legalized or decriminalized abortion on demand.

[a] The case was brought to court by the Causa Justa movement, made up of human rights and civil society groups. The movement sought to decriminalize abortion in Colombia, where, before the verdict, it was only allowed in cases of rape, non-viable pregnancy, or when the life or health of the mother was in danger.