Abortion refers to the termination of a pregnancy before the fetus reaches viability outside the womb, whether induced deliberately or occurring spontaneously. The term is most commonly used to describe induced abortion — a deliberate medical or surgical procedure to end a pregnancy — as distinct from miscarriage, which is spontaneous. What moral, legal, and political status abortion should have is among the most widely debated questions in contemporary public life; how the act itself should be defined and described is also contested across viewpoints. See abortion-viewpoint-pro-life-viewpoint, abortion-viewpoint-pro-choice-viewpoint, and related pages for positions on the underlying questions.
Abortion is practiced across the world under widely varying legal frameworks, ranging from near-total prohibition to access available on request through most of pregnancy. Medical methods of inducing abortion include pharmaceutical regimens (most commonly mifepristone combined with misoprostol) and surgical procedures; the available methods and their legal status vary by jurisdiction and gestational stage.
The biological course of fetal development — from fertilization through implantation, embryonic development, acquisition of cardiac activity, neurological development, and viability — is established in the biomedical literature, though the moral weight to be assigned to each stage is contested. Questions of when morally relevant personhood begins, what rights or interests a pregnant person holds, and how conflicts between those interests should be resolved are subjects of ongoing philosophical, theological, legal, and political debate. These questions are treated on dedicated pages rather than adjudicated here.
Legal access to abortion has shifted significantly in recent decades in numerous countries. In the United States, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion access, which was overturned in 2022 by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, returning regulatory authority to individual states. Legal and legislative activity on the question remains active in many jurisdictions. See abortion-controversy-dobbs-controversy and Abortion - History for fuller treatment.
There is broad agreement among medical and public health researchers that access to safe, legal abortion reduces maternal mortality and morbidity compared to access to unsafe clandestine procedures. This finding has been documented across multiple independent research institutions and international health bodies.1) See abortion-medical-safety-consensus for a full account of the evidence base, its scope, and its limits.
No equivalent cross-institutional consensus exists on the moral, legal, or political questions that constitute the central public debate over abortion. Those questions are addressed on Viewpoint and Debate pages.
A wide range of positions are held on abortion, distinguished principally by differing premises about personhood, bodily autonomy, the role of law, and the weight of competing interests. The following are representative: