Abortion Law and Policy Around the World

The aim of this paper is to provide a panoramic view of laws and policies on abortion around the world, giving a range of country-based examples. It shows that the plethora of convoluted laws and restrictions surrounding abortion do not make any legal or public health sense. What makes abortion safe is simple and irrefutable—when it is available on the woman’s request and is universally affordable and accessible. From this perspective, few existing laws are fit for purpose. However, the road to law reform is long and difficult. In order to achieve the right to safe abortion, advocates will need to study the political, health system, legal, juridical, and socio-cultural realities surrounding existing law and policy in their countries, and decide what kind of law they want (if any). The biggest challenge is to determine what is possible to achieve, build a critical mass of support, and work together with legal experts, parliamentarians, health professionals, and women themselves to change the law—so that everyone with an unwanted pregnancy who seeks an abortion can have it, as early as possible and as late as necessary. Marge Berer is international coordinator of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion, London, UK, and was the editor of Reproductive Health Matters, which she founded, from 1993 to 2015. Please address correspondence to Marge Berer. Email: [email protected]. Competing interests: None declared. Copyright © 2017 Berer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Health and Human Rights Journal HHr HHR_final_logo_alone.indd 1 10/19/15 10:53 AM m. berer / Discussion, ABORTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS, 13-27 14 J U N E 2 0 1 7 V O L U M E 1 9 N U M B E R 1 Health and Human Rights Journal Toward a definition of decriminalization of abortion In simple terms, the decriminalization of abortion means removing specific criminal sanctions against abortion from the law, and changing the law and related policies and regulations to achieve the following: • not punishing anyone for providing safe abortion, • not punishing anyone for having an abortion, • not involving the police in investigating or prosecuting safe abortion provision or practice, • not involving the courts in deciding whether to allow an abortion, and • treating abortion like every other form of health care—that is, using best practice in service delivery, the training of providers, and the development and application of evidence-based guidelines, and applying existing law to deal with any dangerous or negligent practices.