November 12, 2024
By Linda Sulzen
Abortion rights affect women and are highly contested by individuals on both sides of the issue. Worldwide abortion was authorized by request in 77 countries and in most of them up to 12 weeks, 47 countries allow it for health reasons, 43 countries allow abortion to save a mother’s life and it is prohibited in 22 countries as expressed by FOCUS2030.
To find if participants thought abortion should be legal in most cases Pew Research Center interviewed citizens of 27 countries in 2023 and 2024. The results were varied with countries that had less religious affiliation being in support of abortion; seven of the countries surveyed were “Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, the UK and the U.S.” Economic Development also had an effect on attitudes of abortion with countries of lower gross domestic product (GDP) per capita tending to be more religious and restrictive about their views of abortion.
Reuters reported this year that there were “deep divisions,” in Europe when it came to abortion rights with most countries being liberal but all with varying degrees of restrictions on when an abortion should happen.
France was the first to include abortion in their constitution and Poland banned abortion with exceptions for rape and incest. In Spain, women and girls over 16 can get abortions but face issues when doctors refuse to perform them. In Hungary abortion has been legal since 1953 but in 2022 they changed their laws and added restrictions that included having the mother listen to the fetal heartbeat. Hungary and several other European countries require mandatory counseling for women who want to end pregnancies even though the World Health Organization (WHO) criticized the implementation.
In the United States Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022, but before that, it had established abortion rights for most of the world except for Latin American countries where 97% of the women lived with severe abortion restrictions. In December of 2020 Argentina legalized abortion with Mexico and Colombia following by decriminalizing the practice.
In 2023 in Brazil their Supreme Court opened discussion about legalizing abortions but some countries like the United States, Nicaragua and Peru, were headed in the opposite direction. Argentina’s new anti-abortion leader has not reversed their abortion law but instead slow walked provisions as CNN reported in October, “…Since the start of his administration, the government of Argentina’s President Javier Milei halted the purchase of essential supplies for abortion access.”
With the U.S. presidential elections and a change in political parties it is expected that bans on abortion will remain in the hands of the states. With Donald Trump winning the presidential election there were questions that surrounded what would happen with women’s reproductive rights. Trump promised not to further ban abortions but theorists suggest he could use the Food and Drug Administration to ensure abortion pills are dispensed in person.
The NBC news article on Trump’s victory and abortion rights concludes, “A lot of the policies that were in place in the first Trump administration that were then dismantled by the Biden administration — we would expect all those policies to come back.”
While there is a shift in focus with some countries being more liberal and others more conservative on abortion laws it is positive for women and babies’ health that policy is under review. The future is yet to be determined as studies continue to be performed on infant mortality rates in correlation with abortion restrictions.
