Abortion

*Overall, women in developed and developing regions have strikingly similar abortion levels--39 procedures per 1,000 women and 34 per 1,000, respectively.

*About 26 million women have legal abortions each year. About 20 million women have abortions in countries were abortion is severly restricted or prohibited by law.

*39% of the world's women live under government’s with severly restrictive abortion laws: 25% of these women live under goverments that prohibit abortion except to save a woman's life or is prohibited altogether; 10% are in countries that allow abortion only when it is necessary to protect a woman's physical health or her life, and 4% in places where abortion is permitted only to protect a woman's physical or mental health.

*Abortion mortality is low in developed countries, where the procedure is usually legal--less than 1 death per 100,000 abortions. But in developing regions where abortion is often illegal or highly restricted, abortion mortality is hundreds of times higher--330 deaths per 100,000 abortions.

*The World Health Organization estimates that almost 20 million unsafe abortions occur each year--19 million in developing countries.

*An estimated 43% of women will have at least 1 abortion by the time they are 45 years old.

*Catholic women are 29% more likely than Protestants to have an abortion, and are just as likely as all women nationally to do so.

*About 14,000 women have abortions each year following rape.

*The number of abortion providers declined by 14% between 1992 and 1996. 86% of all U.S. counties lacked an abortion provider in 1996.

*Almost half of the women having abortions beyond 15 weeks of gestation say they were delayed because of problems in affording, finding or getting to abortion services. Teens are more likely than older women to delay having an abortion until after 16 weeks of pregnancy, when medical risks associated with abortion increase significantly.

*Without publicly funded family planning services, an estimated 1.3 million additional unplanned pregnancies would occur annually; about 632,300 would end in abortion--at least a 40% increase in the incidence.

(Info from The Alan Guttmacher Institute, which uses various sources.)