The Roadmap to Safe Abortion Worldwide: Lessons from New Global Trends on Incidence, Legality and Safety
Sneha Barot
Guttmacher Institute
First published online: March 20, 2018
The Trump administration and social conservatives in Congress are engaged in broad-based attacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally. In the international sphere, the administration has imposed and expanded the global gag rule and defunded the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), while calling for outright elimination of all U.S. international family planning aid during its first year in office (see “When Antiabortion Ideology Turns into Foreign Policy: How the Global Gag Rule Erodes Health, Ethics and Democracy,” 2017, and “The Benefits of Investing in International Family Planning—and the Price of Slashing Funding,” 2017). At the heart of these attacks is an extreme animus toward abortion rights. Advocates for women’s health fear that these attacks will roll back improvements in sexual and reproductive health services that were built over decades. This is especially true in developing regions where unsafe abortion is a serious public health issue and the limited progress to date is in jeopardy.