World Abortion Law Map

Key:
Green	Abortion never legal, or legal only when necessary to save the life of the mother or protect her physical health
Yellow	Abortion legal in "hard cases", such as rape, incest, and/or deformed child.
Red	Abortion legal for social reasons (e.g. mother says she can't afford a child), or to protect the mother's "mental health" (definitions and requirements vary).
Purple	Abortion legal at any time during pregnancy for any reason.

This map presents a summary of present abortion laws around the world. We first collected this data in 2002. We conducted a major review and update in 2007, so the information should me (mostly) accurate as of that date. We have made some sporadic updates as we became aware of changes since.

For a more detailed breakdown of each nation's laws, see our article Summary of Abortion Laws Around the World. (Clicking on any country in the above map should take you to the entry for that country in the "Summary" article.)

Note: Or, Some excuses from the geeks: A number of small countries are not included on this map. This is not intended to in any way imply that we think these countries are unimportant. It simply reflects the practical reality that it is difficult to cram every country in the world into a map that will fit on a computer screen. Likewise, you may find that the "clickable area" of a country doesn't always quite match the borders. When you get into the inner technical details, clickable regions are defined totally separately from the image itself, and there are practical limits to how precisely clickable regions can be drawn, and we did the best we could. (As it is, we spent weeks working on this map fitting in all the countries that we did.)

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Originally posted 4 Sep 2002.