How is abortion legal

View by category Prohibited Altogether i. To Save the Woman's Life i. To Preserve Health i. Broad Social or Economic Grounds i. On Request Gestational Limits Vary i. Filter current view Open Indicators. MH Law explicitly includes mental health.

R Permitted in cases of rape. I Permitted in cases of incest. F Permitted in cases of fetal impairment. SA Spousal authorization required. SX Sex-selective abortion prohibited. Law Unclear. Close Map detail tray. An estimated 20 million unsafe abortions occur each year and claim the lives of approximately 47, women annually Ipas, It is difficult to reduce maternal mortality without attention to the toll that unsafe abortion takes. Where abortion is illegal, access to high-quality postabortion care, which includes providing family planning counseling and methods, is critical.

Amid the COVID pandemic, which presented the greatest public health threat in generations and exposed long-present systemic inequities in the U. The Guttmacher Institute, which tracks state-level abortion legislation, has marked as the most devastating state legislative session for abortion rights in history. Wade to 1, Number of those introduced abortion-restrictive statutes enacted into law as of August These newly enacted restrictions compound the harms of abortion-restrictive laws that preceded them.

Of the 97 new measures, more than 80 were signed into law in states that already have onerous abortion restrictions, making abortion even harder to access. Mississippi, for example, whose week ban is at the center of Dobbs v. The abortion restrictions and bans that have passed in states this year come in a range of forms, all of which have the ultimate goal of ending access to legal abortion care in the United States.

They include both established tactics and some new and incredibly extreme provisions designed to make abortion care inaccessible, including the following:. This bounty hunter scheme was designed to thwart judicial intervention to protect abortion access before the law could take effect, and it has succeeded in that objective.

Although a federal district court scheduled a hearing to consider whether the law should be enjoined, the Fifth Circuit intervened before the hearing took place and concluded that the law could go into effect. Certain state legislatures have stood out this year as particularly hostile to abortion care. Arkansas has enacted 10 restrictive abortion bills so far in Of the new restrictions enacted this year, 12 fall under the category of an abortion ban, including near-total bans, trigger bans, reason bans, and gestational bans.

Additional broadly restrictive bills enacted this year include trigger bans passed in Oklahoma and Texas that would ban abortion if Roe is overturned or gutted, 24 joining 10 other states that have already passed such bans. The coronavirus pandemic showed the importance of telehealth in expanding access to health care and ensuring continuity of care, as well as the critical role of medication abortion in expanding safe options for abortion. Yet while many states acted to expand access to telehealth, some explicitly excluded abortion from their expansions and enacted further restrictions on medication abortion.

Arizona, Indiana, Montana, Ohio, and Oklahoma all enacted laws requiring medication abortion care to be provided in person, thereby banning telemedicine for abortion care. In a year when policymakers have a particular responsibility to act to protect and expand access to quality, comprehensive health care, many have done just the opposite.

If the Supreme Court undermines abortion rights in Dobbs v. The result is legal chaos—which has been the situation with reference to abortion since it was first made illegal in this country. Contrary to popular belief, the legal strictures against abortion are of comparatively recent origin.

Until the early nineteenth century—at common law both in England and in the United States—abortion before quickening was not illegal at all. It became so only in the early s. Abortions were made illegal for this reason except where they were necessary to save the life of the mother; that is, where the great risk of infection which every operation involved was outweighed by the risk of carrying that particular pregnancy to term. The situation is today reversed; abortion under modern hospital conditions is safer than childbirth.

Nor is there any evidence that abortion involves psychological health hazards. A poll of the American Psychiatric Association in the mids revealed overwhelming support for more easily available abortions and a conviction that adverse psychological sequelae from abortion are negligible both on an absolute standard and as compared with such sequelae from childbirth and unwanted children.

Though the population experts have not yet aligned themselves on the side of abortion-law reform, something is beginning to happen. Seven states—Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, and North Carolina—have amended their laws to permit abortion not only to save life but also to protect the health, mental and physical, of the mother, in cases of rape and incest, and to avert the birth of defective offspring Governor Reagan forced the omission of this ground in the California law.

Many other states have been and are now considering abortion reform or repeal bills but usually without the support of the powerful groups who are backing other forms of population control.

The old laws are also beginning to face challenges in the courts and are being attacked on a variety of constitutional grounds. The ratio of in-hospital abortions to live births in New York City was approximately one to for private patients and something like one to 10, in municipal hospitals.

At the same time the women whose deaths were associated with abortion in New York City in a typical year were 56 percent black, 23 percent Puerto Rican, and 21 percent white. The to 10, in-hospital abortions contrast, of course, with the estimated one million performed outside hospitals annually. Generally speaking, the laws do not distinguish in their prohibitions of abortions between doctors and nondoctors.