Jan 13
Abortion policy around the world
Abortion is the right that women like me, who were born and have been living in countries with supporting policy, take for granted.
It is interesting to look at one of the abortion datasets to see how the policy differs across the countries and continents. Besides, I love to “de-myth” some of my “conceptions” regarding the abortion policy. One of them is: more religious countries have stricter abortion policy?
I used the abortion dataset provided by the World Health Organization’s Global Abortion Policies Database.
To explore the correlation between religiousness and abortion policy, I also combined with the 2 data-sets: Our world in Data — Main religion of the country and Datahub — World religion project.
- How the dataset looks like:
The dataset includes 263 countries and territories. It is pretty extensive with questions ranging from which documents are used for abortion policy and additional notes. However, I filtered for only the columns for the Yes/No questions regarding the policy used in my analysis. Those are the reasons that are used for abortion among the countries in the dataset. Each of the questions have 3 (exclusive) choices: Yes/No/Law Varies By Jurisdiction
1j. On request
1a. To save a woman’s life
1b. To preserve a woman’s health
1c. To preserve a woman’s physical health
1d. To preserve a woman’s mental health
1e. In cases of intellectual or cognitive disability of the woman
1f. In cases of incest
1g. In cases of rape
1h. In cases of foetal impairment
1i. For economic or social reasons
2. How the abortion policies differ across countries?
Firstly, I am interested in how many countries allow certain reasons for abortion. For this, I look at all the questions and count the number of countries which allow or do not allow those
What I can see are:
- More than a half of the countries allow abortion to save women’s life. This is the point/base argument that most countries agree on
- In contrast, more than a half country does not allow Economic or social reasons to be used for abortion
- To my surprise, the women with intellectual/cognitive disability could not allowed for abortion in more than a half of the countries as well
3. How about continents?
Looking at all 10 questions is hard to have an overview on the general policy of each continents. Let us have a closer look at only 4 questions. I also rank those 4 policies according to the “freedom” that they give. I treat “Abortion on request” as the most liberal form. Following are abortion to save lives (2nd), to preserve health (3rd) and for economic/social reasons (4th)
Is the abortion allowed:
1j. On request1i. For economic or social reasons
1b. To preserve a woman’s health
1a. To save a woman’s life
Then those questions are group together, if abortion on request is allow, then “green” color is assigned to the country as it gives the most freedom. If abortion on request is allow but for economic reason, it is allowed, then “blue” color is assigned. The same process is done for the other 2 reasons.
We can observe some patterns from the data as follows:
- Although the number of countries in North America is small, all the continent’s countries allow abortion on request.
- Europe has about a half of the countries allow abortion on request while the other half do not allow
- Africa and Asia is pretty conservative on abortion on request. However, the countries in those 2 continents tend to allow abortion if it is for women’s health and life.
4. Are more religious countries have stricter abortion policies?
One of the impression I have when living in Europe is that the countries with higher Christian followers tend to have stricter abortion rule. I often see in the news as well that religious reasons are used to against the right to abortion.
In order to validate this, I select the countries with Christianity as the main religion and group them according to the percentage of Christian followers among the whole population
The countries with high percentages of Christian followers are less likely to allow for abortion on request, as can be seen from the first group. Other than that, the differences among the other 3 groups are not obvious. So, I can safely say that my “misconception” about religiousness and stricter abortion policy is not supported by data
