from Guttmacher...
LEGALITY IS NOT THE DETERMINING FACTOR.
"If legality is not the determining factor, what drives the rates at which abortions occur in a given country?..."
"Yet, while it may seem paradoxical, a country's abortion rate is not closely correlated with whether abortion is legal there. For example, abortion levels are quite high in Latin American countries, where abortion is highly restricted. (In fact, 20 million of the 46 million abortions performed annually worldwide occur in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws.) At the same time, abortion rates are quite low throughout Western Europe, where the procedure is legal and widely available. Also, Eastern and Western Europe have the world's highest and lowest abortion rates, respectively, yet abortion is generally legal throughout the Continent.
If legality is not the determining factor, what drives the rates at which abortions occur in a given country? Clearly, a key factor is the rate at which women experience unintended pregnancies--itself a function of the interplay between a couple's family-size (and timing) goals and their contraceptive use.
Abortion levels are high in countries where the desire for small families is strong but contraceptive use is low or ineffective. For example, in most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, where desired family size has been small for many years, modern contraceptive methods were not generally available until recently. As a result, women relied on abortion--which was legal, safe and easily accessible--to regulate births. However, as contraceptives have become much easier to obtain in recent years, the situation has begun to change rapidly, and abortion rates in some of these countries fell by as much as 50% between 1990 and 1996.
In sharp contrast, even in countries where abortion is legal and widely available, abortion rates are low if couples practice contraception effectively to limit or space births. In the Netherlands, for example, where abortion has been legal and widely accessible for many years, abortion and unintended pregnancy rates are low because of widespread contraceptive use." |
