The Effects of Criminalisation on Abortion Outcomes: A Comprehensive Analysis of Legal and Health Evidence

Abortion remains criminalized to varying extents in the majority of countries worldwide. International human rights bodies have acknowledged that criminalization contributes to substandard healthcare services, a lack of registration and availability of essential medications like misoprostol and misoprostol, barriers to accessing abortion-related information, restrictions on training for abortion providers, delays in abortion services, and an increase in unsafe abortions. Notably, criminalization fails to achieve its purported goals of protecting individuals from unsafe abortion or preventing abortion altogether. Human rights organizations advocate for decriminalization, which has been shown to reduce stigma, enhance the quality of care, and improve access to safe abortion services. This review synthesizes evidence from reproductive health, legal frameworks, policy studies, and human rights analyses to address knowledge gaps regarding the health and non-health outcomes of abortion criminalization. The findings demonstrate how criminalization adversely impacts individuals seeking abortion, healthcare providers, and overall health systems, highlighting its inconsistency with the core principles of international human rights law. Moreover, this analysis reinforces empirical evidence of the harms caused by criminalization, as previously identified by human rights bodies, and strengthens the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommendation for the complete decriminalization of abortion.

کلیدواژه ها:

Reproductive Health ، Abortion ، Criminalisation ، Human Rights ، Safe Abortion