Abortions & Unintended Pregnancies Globally
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that approximately 121 million unintended pregnancies worldwide occurred annually between 2015 and 2019. Of those, 61% ended in abortions, translating to about 73 million abortions globally per year.
Today, 970 million women of reproductive age live in countries that broadly allow abortion, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. These represent 59% of the women residents of reproductive age worldwide. About 90 million women of reproductive age live (5% of those globally) live in the 24 countries banning abortion in all circumstances. These include Iraq, Sierra Leone, Egypt, El Salvador and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
With the Supreme Court’s June 4, 2022, announcement of its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the United States became one of only four countries to reverse freedoms to obtain an abortion in more than a quarter century based on research by the Center for Reproductive Rights:
- From 1994 to 2019, twenty countries expanded the right to an abortion to preserve a woman’s physical and/or mental health, affecting a total 211 million women of reproductive age.
- In the same period, another three countries expanded a woman’s rights to allow abortions on socioeconomic grounds, including her actual or reasonably foreseeable environment as well as social or economic circumstances.
- Fifteen more countries liberalized their abortion laws to permit abortions upon request within varied gestational time limits, including the Northern Ireland (2019), the Republic of Ireland (2018) and Cyprus (2018) as three of the most recent.
- Joining those 15 since 2019 are another three: Colombia (February 2022), Mexico (September 2021) and Argentina (2020.)
Protests around the world
Following a near-total abortion ban in Poland introduced in January 2021, mass demonstrations broke out 11 months later in reaction to the death from sepsis of a woman 22 weeks pregnant. Her family said the ban delayed life-saving treatment.
In September 2021, thousands marched for abortion rights across Latin America. In March 2022, Salvadoran women marched by the thousands to demand easing of that country’s ban to allow abortions in cases of rape, fetal non-viability, or whenever the mother’s life is at risk. Protestors decried cases in which women have been sentenced to prison for as long as 30 years after suffering miscarriages and stillbirths.
In Argentina in 2018, organizers claimed that nearly 1 million women took to the streets to protest that nation’s abortion restrictions, hundreds dressed in “The Handmaid’s Tale” costumes.
Protestors wore green handkerchiefs as a reference to white scarves used by women whose children disappeared under Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Abortion rights advocates worldwide have since adopted green as the color symbol for its movement.
After the Argentina protests, in December 2020 the national senate expanded abortion rights to on demand within 14 weeks of gestation, making Argentina the third Latin American country to do so, after Guyana (1995) and Uruguay (2012).
Abortion laws by country
