Abortion Rate in Israel Drops 10 Percent in 10 Years
Israel’s abortion rate has dropped significantly since 2000, according to the Health Ministry’s annual abortion report.
The report indicates that for women of fertile age, Israel performed 11.1 abortions per every 1,000 women in 2010, showing a 10 percent drop from the year 2000.
Ministry official Dr. Yoram Lotan told The Jerusalem Post that it “sounded very logical” that the abortion decline is due to the aging of Russian immigrants in Israel. According to The Jerusalem Post, abortions are considered a very acceptable method of birth control in the Russian culture.
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According to The Jerusalem Post, the abortion report indicates that new immigrant women were more likely to request abortions than women who had lived in Israel for multiple years.
According to Israel Today, the drop in abortion count is not due to stricter government regulations. The Israeli government approves 98 percent of all abortion requests, 53 percent of which were performed due to sexual relations out of wedlock or sexual relations with close relatives.
This is in comparison to the U.S. abortion rate, which has dropped by 8 percent from 2000 to 2008, according to a report conducted by the Obstetrics & Gynecology journal published by the Guttmacher Institute.
This makes the abortion rate in the U.S. higher than that of Israel’s, with 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women.
Canada’s abortion rate also declined to 100,000 a year, according to The National Post.
Organizations such as the National Right to Life and the American Life League support pro-life endeavors in the U.S. Similarly, Israel’s Be’ad Chaim seeks to help women through “crisis pregnancies.”
While only 10 percent of Israel’s abortions were a result of a women being under 17 years of age or over 40 years of age, America’s abortion rate indicates that teen abortions in the U.S. rose by 1 percent from 2005 to 2006.
As Israel Today contends, the country would have 5-10 million more Israelis had it subsided from abortion practices, beginning in 1948.
