Methods

What is counted

Legally induced abortions reported by national statistical offices for a calendar year, as collected by Eurostat in dataset demo_fabort. This is an administrative count of procedures recorded within a country's legal reporting system. It is not an estimate of how many abortions occurred.

The distinction matters most where the law is restrictive. Procedures that happen outside the reporting system — abroad, or informally — are absent from the count by construction. A country with a near-zero reported figure is telling you about its reporting regime as much as about its population.

Derived measures

Rate per 1,000 women aged 15–49

reported ÷ (women 15–49 ÷ 1000). The denominator is the female population on 1 January of the same year, summed across Eurostat's seven five-year bands from 15–19 to 45–49 (demo_pjangroup). A country-year is only given a rate when all seven bands are present — a partial sum would understate the denominator and inflate the rate.

Per 100 live births

reported ÷ live births × 100, using demo_gind indicator LBIRTH.

Decisions taken

Missing data is never filled in

No interpolation, no carry-forward, no zero-fill. Lines break at gaps, and countries that reported nothing remain visible in the ranking with "no data" rather than being dropped. A country that vanishes from a chart looks like a country with nothing to report.

The opening year is chosen, not fixed

The page opens on the most recent year that at least 20 countries reported — 2021 as built. Opening on the newest year in the data would show a nearly empty chart, because registers publish on very different schedules.

Aggregates are excluded

Eurostat's "Germany including former GDR" and "Metropolitan France" series overlap the country series and are dropped, so no country is counted twice.

Provisional figures are marked

Values the publisher flagged as provisional are drawn at reduced opacity, suffixed p, and shown in a paler tone on the coverage strip.

Model estimates are kept apart

WHO publishes modelled abortion rates for around 150 countries, but as a single 2015–2019 average with wide uncertainty intervals. Those are not comparable with reported counts and are never drawn on the same axis.

No ranking language

The charts sort by value because that answers "which countries are highest", but nothing here frames a country as best or worst. The data does not support a moral ordering and the design does not imply one.

Known limits

• Definitions differ between countries — residency rules, gestational limits and reporting duties are not harmonised. Small differences between countries are noise.
• Several countries with well-run registers are missing from Eurostat's collection or stop early. See coverage.
• Rates depend on a population denominator that is itself revised; a rate can move slightly when only the denominator changed.