Ten years after the decriminalisation of abortion in Portugal, each year around 500 Portuguese women have been travelling to Spain to end their pregnancy. The two reasons given are privacy and 'having passed the legal deadline.'
According to the Spain’s abortion clinic association, ACAIVE, the majority of Portuguese women who choose to have an abortion in their neighboring country do so because they have been pregnant for more than ten weeks, the deadline under the Portuguese law which came into force on July 15, 2017.
In Spain, women deciding on an abortion can do so up to 14 weeks into their pregnancy.
The second reason is that Spanish clinics offer confidentiality they many women believe can not be guaranteed in their home country.
ACAIVE estimates that 400 Portuguese women a year use clinics in Badajoz, 60 use facilities in Galicia, 26 in Huelva, the balance being spread throughout the country.
Official data from the Directorate-General for Health for 2016 are not yet available, but statistics for the full eight years that abortion has been decriminalised (2008 to 2015) show a downward trend for abortions in Portugal, especially from 2012 onwards.
As for a history of abortions, 70% of women who decided to abort in 2015 had never had an abortion, 21% had already had one, almost 6% had undergone two and 2.5% already had faced three or more abortions.
Portuguese abortion clinic have acquired 134,564 Mifepristone pills, known as the 'abortion pill', in the past ten years since the termination of pregnancy before 10 weeks was decriminalised.
The drug, which blocks the hormone essential for the maintenance of pregnancy, has been legal in Portugal since July 2007.
In 2017, between January and March, 5,420 tablets were sold. In the latest report of the Directorate-General for Health, 15,873 abortions were carried out in 2015.
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