Where The Abortions Are (Part II)

Worldabortionmap3After 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.

SOURCE MAPS.

MORE DATA.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

10 thoughts on “Where The Abortions Are (Part II)”

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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?

  5. 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.

Comments are closed.