Unsafe abortion

The World Health Organization defines an unsafe abortion as a procedure for terminating a pregnancy carried out either by a person lacking the necessary information or skills, or in an environment that does not conform to minimal medical standards, or both. The test is the conditions of the procedure, not the law where it happened. A procedure that is lawful can still be unsafe if whoever performs it is not trained for it or the setting falls short of those standards, and a procedure carried out to standard is not made unsafe by a restrictive law.

The distinction changes what the figures mean. WHO puts about 45 percent of induced abortions worldwide in the unsafe category. Where unsafe abortion is common, deaths run to more than 200 for every 100,000 procedures, against fewer than 1 per 100,000 where abortion is safe. A review of studies from 2009 to 2020 attributed about 8 percent of maternal deaths worldwide to unsafe abortion, which is why it appears in almost every list of the leading causes, alongside severe bleeding and high blood pressure disorders of pregnancy.

The law is not irrelevant to the count, only to the definition. WHO reports that the share of abortions that are unsafe is significantly higher in countries with highly restrictive laws than in countries with less restrictive ones, and that restricting access does not reduce the number of abortions, only whether they are safe. Reading unsafe as a synonym for illegal therefore misses what the word measures: who performed the procedure, and in what conditions.