A Global Policy Conundrum

Abstract

Abortion is at once a widely practised method of fertility control and a sensitive, complex and contentious issue which defies simple resolution.¹ It has sparked major controversy in the Western liberal democracies and remains a politically explosive social problem in the United States of America (USA). A review of abortion policy was initiated in former communist societies once the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate in 1989. Less noticed than these developments, abortion is an increasingly contested policy issue in a number of developing countries. This study aims in part to compare and contrast — and in effect to link — the abortion controversy globally by focusing on Kenya, Mexico and Poland, where the author has carried out extensive fieldwork.²