By Sammi Mathew, NWPC Communications Intern
The legality of abortion has become a hot topic across cultures, religions, regions, and moral battlefields. This debate continually seeks to answer whether the government-enforced incentive of penalties for abortion will have significant outcomes or any outcomes in the number of abortions at all. Beyond rumors, there is scarce evidence to show that instituting penalties for women undergoing an abortion treatment resulted in any hint of effectiveness to change pregnant women’s general behavior of whether they choose to have an abortion or not. This public policy may change how women choose or are forced to opt for different abortion methods. However, the numbers stay relatively the same while producing a number of perverse incentives, delegitimizing the original incentive.
The various countries which enact laws created to penalize women who have abortions as well as those who help to perform the abortion, work as the entities which institute the incentives. They enforce their agenda through a negative incentive designed to initiate change, designed with the intention that women will be discouraged from having abortions. Some of these negative incentives include imprisonment for up to 15 years for women who induce their own abortion in Victoria and imprisoned for murder in El Salvador. The target population intended to change their behavior as a result of the incentive becomes the female-bodied and more specifically pregnant female citizens of the country. These factors determine if policies are regarded to be successful, or disillusioned attempts to create change in a pond of overwhelming circumstances.
Despite that these laws were thoroughly executed and implemented as planned, there is limited evidence to show the implementation of these laws created any modification in the target’s behavior. After comparing statistics of both safe and unsafe abortions among a plethora of countries, researchers found that in 2008, the abortion rate was minute in subregions where women lived under pro-choice laws in comparison to subregions with stricter abortion laws. Although certain countries placed restrictions on abortion in order to reduce the number of abortions, the numbers worked against the incentive and exceeded the abortion rates of countries with a liberal abortion policy. The ineffectiveness of this incentive is further illuminated when looking at legal and illegal abortion rates on a global scale. Globally each year, 42 million women will go through with an abortion procedure, an estimated 20 million of which live in countries that restrict or prohibit abortion. Despite the variance in legality across developed and developing countries, abortion rates remain relatively similar. With mirroring rates of abortion between countries with the abortion penalty incentive and countries without, it calls into question where and how abortions are being performed if they cannot be a medical procedure by law.
While the governments which penalized those who had abortions certainly did make a substantial impact on pregnant women, it is the perverse incentives rather than the intended that arose as repercussions. Rather than diminishing abortion rates, WHO estimated that women worldwide receive 19 to 20 million unsafe abortions each year between 1993 and 2003. These unmonitored abortions have led to severe aftermath. Among those who proceed with illegal abortions, 5.3 million women fall victim to becoming temporary or permanent disability as a result of an unsafe abortion Furthermore, 78,000 of the 600,000 women who die from pregnancy-related causes each year die from abortion complications. Of these abortion-related deaths, 95% occur in economically developing countries. In these countries, every eight minutes, a woman dies due to the complications of a proceeding with unsafe abortion.
There is a ceaseless stream of perverse incentives that an abortion penalty would cause, all of which contrast heavily with the original incentive which had the goal of reducing abortions and saving lives. Correspondingly, another study concluded that “morbidity and mortality resulting from abortion tend to be high in countries and regions characterized by restrictive abortion laws, and is very low when these are liberal…” highlighting the perverse incentive of increased female deaths as an outcome of overbearing abortion laws. While it could be argued that wealthier states have better healthcare and therefore have lower maternal mortality rates, there is not enough evidence to support such a claim. Ireland, a liberal-lawed country with restrictive abortion laws, boasts of their low maternal mortality. However, there has been a significant increase in “abortion-tourism” of neighboring countries, disproving the notion that abortion rates and/or maternal mortality rates have decreased as a result of the ban. Between 2001 and 2008, 45,645 women with Irish addresses visited British abortion clinics. Even with the information available, it is likely that not all women from Ireland provide Irish addresses to abortion clinics, and the figure presented is likely to be an underestimate.
In addition to the perverse incentive of maternal mortality increasing, In El Salvador, a country with some of the most militant abortion laws across the globe, women who have miscarriages are consistently accused of trying to abort their fetuses. In more extreme cases, they are imprisoned for murder if found guilty. Due to such strict laws imposed on women of El Salvador, they are threatened for being jailed as the result of the abortion penalty incentive, despite women experiencing miscarriages have no control over the growth of the fetus inside them.
Given that strict abortion laws have proven to have no effect on the reproductive choices of women, it is safe to deem this incentive ineffective. This may be due to a variety of factors. For starters, despite that these government-established penalties may cause alarm and ultimately prevent some pregnant women from pursuing abortion, not all women conform to this incentive, and certainly not enough to cause significant differences in numbers of abortion between countries with liberal and conservative abortion laws. The women in these subregions have control over their own behavior and are unitary actors, but the inefficiency of the incentive lies in the fact that the penalty does not outweigh other factors for the targets such as socio-economic standing or family judgment. The consequences that accompany the various potential penalties do not outweigh the benefits of having an abortion.
Although it is arguable that anti-abortion policies were successful in and of themselves, the intended incentive of reducing the number of abortions was not a victorious feat. The goals of governments instituting abortion penalties have yet to be accomplished, and the numbers of abortions are nearly identical when comparing countries with and without abortion penalty incentives. Unfortunately, the main outcome of the difference is that women are dying from unsafe abortion conditions as a result.
Sammi Mathew is a devout human rights advocate from Cincinnati, Ohio. She serves as the Communications Intern at the National Women’s Political Caucus, as well as the Government Affairs Legislative Intern at Hannah News Service. Sammi also works as the Staff Assistant to the District 3 Office of the Louisville Metro Government. She is currently majoring in Political Science and minoring in Communication at the University of Louisville. She operates as the Vice President of United Nations Association Women at the University of Louisville, helping to create the first United Nations Association Women’s Chapter on a college campus in America. Previously, Sammi has interned for the Louisville Metro Government’s Office for Women, been a Deputy Field Organizer of the Kentucky Democratic Party, and Brand Marketing Associate of vegan food company V-Grits. Sammi enjoys keeping up with current events politics as well as gender equality and other human rights concerns on a local and international level.
