Last year,abortion was also decriminalised in South Korea and Thailand,andaccess expanded in India,while the small European republic ofSan Marino voted to remove its own ban via referendum – abortion will be legal on request from next year.
InMexico,long-standing state abortion bans were largely struck down last year when its Supreme Court ruled criminal penalties for abortion were unconstitutional.
Irelandoverturned its ban in 2019,following the high-profile death of a woman denied an abortion in hospital. (An unborn fetus had previously had the same right to life as its mother under the country’s 8th Constitutional Amendment of 1983.)
A new wave of abortion rights advocacy has also been sweeping throughSouth America,where many abortions are still illegal and,consequently,unsafe. Earlier this year,Colombia followedArgentina (the homeland of Pope Francis) in legalising terminations. And inChile,which had banned it outright up until 2017,abortion rights have been included in a new draft Constitution that will be put to a popular vote.
Parts ofAfrica,where women also frequently die from unsafe abortions,have now decriminalised it too,and nations such asSouth Africa,Tunisia and Zambia have fairly liberal access today.
Where laws are tightening
The US now stands among just a handful of countries that have since the 1990s wound back abortion access. In the days since the Supreme Court gave power back to the states,abortions have become illegal in at least eight of them (save for in life-threatening cases).
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In broadly liberal Europe,Poland has long been an outlier on reproductive rights – for nearly three decades abortion has only been allowed to save the mother’s life or in the case of rape or fetal abnormalities. But when the hard-right Law and Justice party came to power in 2015,it moved to tighten the laws even further. The mostly-Catholic country removed the fetal abnormality exception – the kind most commonly used – in 2020.Last year,massive protests broke out following the death of a woman whose doctors refused to abort a non-viable fetus. She died of septic shock.
Abortion is legal inItaly,butexperts say access is increasingly restrictive in a country where the pro-life movement has been energised by similar culture wars in the US.
While some parts of South America are softening laws,Brazilremains about as strict on abortion as Poland. In 2016,its highest court made a non-binding decision that abortion shouldn’t be a crime in the first three months of pregnancy,just as the hard-right Brazilian government pushed through a bill toughening restrictions. Like former US president Donald Trump,President Jair Bolsonaro has since been stacking his Supreme Tribunal’s bench with conservative justices to block any further attempts to legalise abortion,and experts say he will be galvanised by the fall of Roe v Wade. Since Brazil banned abortion pills as well as surgical procedures,many women have been forced to turn to the black market.
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In 1998,El Salvador removedallexceptions from its abortion ban,a move now regularly challenged by international human rights groups as childbirth remains a leading cause of death for women and girls there. Some women have even been jailed for decades for suffering miscarriages.
Ananalysis by the Guttmacher research institutefound that abortion rates are commonly higher in countries restricting access.