After putting up a world map of abortion law last week, some commenters expressed a desire for a map of abortions by percentage (i.e., which countries had the highest abortion rates rather than the most permissive laws).
One helpful commenter posted a link to such a map, so here it is!
One thing ot note about this map is that it doesn’t have abortion reporting from many countries, particularly in South America and Africa. This may be because the makers of the map did’t have statistics available to them or because these countries don’t keep good abortion statistics (perhaps because it’s illegal in many of these countries and many abortions/crimes go unreported).
Note that on this map the U.S. is broken down by state as well.
Is the data percentage correct? I looked at the source document, and for California at least, it *looked* like the percentage was not abort/preg but abort-in-state/abort-out-of-state…is it really 30%? That just seems like an insanely high number.
Go Utah!
Some comments, since I’m the one who made that map. Many countries in South America, Africa, etc., don’t report abortion statistics (that I’m aware of). Many of these countries restrict abortion more than, say, the US or European countries. Abortion advocates claim that illegal abortions occur at very high rates in these countries; while I doubt their specific claims, there are certainly many unreported abortions in these countries.
California does have a high rate of abortions. In 2000 abortions in California ended 30.7% of known pregnancies there. This includes abortions by nonresidents, but this probably doesn’t change the figure much. The latest data limited to California residents is from the CDC for 1997; this data implied 34.5% of California resident pregnancies (ignoring miscarriages) ended in abortion that year.
The state-level data in that map is updated on this page:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/mapstatesabrate.html
Last night on PBS the program Frontline was about Abortion in Mississippi. That state has only 1 abortuary. The rest have all been shut down by prayer outside of the abortuaries and more restrictive state laws.
At the risk of opening a can of worms, it would be interesting to compare a US county by county abortion rate mape with the red county/blue county maps of recent national elections. I wonder if the apparently obvious correlation would really show up?
Some county information is available on Wm. Robert Johnson’s site.
And here’s the red & blue county map.
How did Prop 73 go in California?
It lost, though it was the closest of the ballot initiatives.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I wasn’t surprised to see the Maritimes has a lower abortion rate than the rest of our country, not wealthy but traditional people there. I didn’t know my next-door province of Saskatchewan was lower too, and Saskatchewan isn’t exactly in great straits…. It does seem the most affluent parts of Canada have the highest abortion rates.