Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 18/07/2022
More than 700,000 abortions have been performed in Slovenia in the last 70 years, the portal Domovina asserted in a 24 June article entitled Victory for the Pro-Life Movement in the US. Their source was a claim by the civil initiative March for Life, which invites people to sign a Declaration for Life.
The right to an abortion was signed into law in Yugoslavia in 1952 with the Decree on the Procedure for the Permitted Removal of a Foetus. And Article 55 of the Slovenian Constitution stipulates that everyone has the right to decide whether to bear children. But the Constitutional Court, the only authority with the power to adjudicate on this issue, has never heard a case concerning whether or not the termination of pregnancy is protected by the Constitution or not.
Data by the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) show that between 1955 and 2020 about 615,000 abortions were legally performed in Slovenia. These abortions are initiated at the request of women until the 10th week of pregnancy, beyond which point a special abortion commission considers each case separately. The overall figure includes abortions performed due to severe illness of the woman or deformation of the fetus.
The NIJZ has explained that the data for the period from 1955 to 1979 are less reliable. Methodological notes to the data on NIJZ’s data portal also contain the warning that the data on legal abortions in 2015 are underestimated by about two percent since two health providers did not report on cases of termination of pregnancy with pills.
As the NIJZ explained to Oštro in January, “any restriction on the right of access to legal and professional assistance to women who wish to terminate their pregnancy can have a negative health outcome.” They explained that in some countries without the right to abortion, women face severe distress due to unwanted pregnancy and seek help abroad or resort to various illegal and unprofessional procedures that may put their lives at risk.
The claim that over 700,000 pregnancies have been performed in Slovenia in the last 70 years is unsubstantiated since there are no official data for the entire 70 years and the data available for the last 65 years are partially unreliable.