Is Uruguay’s Claim on Abortion True?

By Wendy Wright | March 17, 2015

Since Uruguay legalized abortion in 2012, “there have been no maternal deaths due to abortion,” said Uruguay’s ambassador to the UN. Gonzalo Koncke spoke at a Planned Parenthood event last night at the UN.

That is quite a claim. But is it true? And does legalizing abortion reduce maternal deaths?

It turns out Uruguay reported no maternal deaths from “unsafe abortion” for 3 years PRIOR to abortion being legalized, and only 2 cases in the 3 years before that.

Rebecca Oas, a researcher with C-Fam, looked into these numbers last year when she noticed wildly fluctuating data in a UNFPA report.

As she noted in Securing a Better Future For Mothers:

The [UNFPA] report claims that abortion caused 42 percent of maternal deaths in 2001, 28 percent in 2002, and 55 percent in 2003. These numbers seem dubiously high and the enormous disparity from one year to the next, with no explanation given, raises further questions about the quality of the data used and the methodology employed.

The report goes on to say that after implementing its reproductive health program, Uruguay registered “a maximum of 2 cases of maternal deaths from unsafe abortion” from 2004-2007, and none at all from 2008-2011.

So is Uruguay’s reporting on maternal deaths untrustworthy?

If it is true that there have been no maternal deaths since 2008, it could be attributed to better health care, infrastructure to get care when needed, and other elements that would not fall neatly under the label of “sexual and reproductive health” but do, in fact, improve maternal health.

One thing is certain: if Uruguay’s numbers are to be believed, then legalizing abortion cannot get credit for eliminating maternal deaths.

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