Abortion Data

What Is Abortion?

Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy, either spontaneous (when it occurs without any intervention or procedure, also known as miscarriage) or induced (the intentional termination of a pregnancy through a medical or surgical procedure). The World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized that abortion is an essential health service for all women and people with the capacity to gestate. In Mexico, the Technical Guidelines for the Provision of Safe Abortion Care establish, at the federal level, the basic criteria for providing this service from a gender perspective and in accordance with human rights standards. This means that abortion care must be comprehensive (ensuring access to information and care before, during, and after the procedure) and high-quality (effective, efficient, accessible, safe, person-centered, and delivered with equal treatment). Providing abortion care under these conditions is essential in order to guarantee the full exercise of the rights associated with this service, including the rights to health, reproductive autonomy, and equality and non-discrimination.

Beyond being a core issue of reproductive justice, abortion is also a matter of public health and social justice. It is a service to which all women and people with the capacity to gestate must have access, which requires removing existing barriers, particularly in contexts of structural inequality. Abortion care must also meet the most up-to-date clinical standards endorsed by the international scientific community, including those set forth in the latest edition of the WHO Abortion Care Guideline.

How Is Abortion Linked to Access to Information and Transparency?

Access to information is a human right that encompasses the ability to seek, request, receive, and disseminate information generated, managed, or held by public authorities. This right ensures that individuals can obtain information both actively (through research) and passively (when it is provided to them) so they can form informed opinions about their context and make life decisions accordingly. In the context of abortion care, ensuring that women and pregnant people receive scientific information grounded in a human rights framework is essential for the exercise of reproductive autonomy. For this reason, the WHO recognizes the provision of accurate information as a core clinical component of abortion care.

Access to information also promotes transparency and accountability on the part of public authorities in fulfilling their functions and obligations. The ability to obtain this information makes it possible to monitor the implementation of public policies designed to guarantee access to essential health services, including abortion. It also enables the assessment of whether services are delivered in accordance with international clinical and human rights standards. The WHO further recognizes that accessible monitoring mechanisms for abortion services based on publicly available information help ensure that care is provided in safe environments and meets established quality standards.

In Mexico, legal termination of pregnancy (LTP) refers to an abortion performed at the request of the woman or pregnant person in the exercise of their reproductive autonomy and carried out within the time limits permitted under the applicable legal framework. Although nearly ninety years have passed since feminist movements began demanding the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico, progress in legal reform and public policy remains insufficient. Despite being a health service, abortion continues to be regulated through criminal codes. As of April 2026, abortion has been decriminalized in the following entities: Mexico City (2007), Oaxaca (2019), Hidalgo (2021), Veracruz (2021), Coahuila (2021), Baja California (2021), Colima (2021), Sinaloa (2022), Guerrero (2022), Baja California Sur (2022), Quintana Roo (2022), Puebla (2024), Jalisco (2024), Michoacán (2024), Chiapas (2024), San Luis Potosí (2024), Zacatecas (2024), State of Mexico (2024), Chihuahua (2025), Nayarit (2025), Campeche (2025), Yucatán (2025), Tabasco (2025), and Tlaxcala (2025).

In Aguascalientes, on August 30, 2023, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN, Supreme Court) ruled on Amparo in Review 79/2023 and ordered the abrogation of the crime of self-induced abortion. In December 2023, the state complied and decriminalized abortion up to 12.6 weeks of pregnancy. However, in August 2024, the state Congress voted to reduce the decriminalization period to six weeks—an amendment that, in practice, amounts to a disguised ban.

In the case of the Federal Criminal Code, in September 2023 the Supreme Court ordered Congress to repeal the provisions that criminalized abortion without exception; however, this ruling has yet to be implemented. In 2024, collegiate courts in Jalisco, Nayarit, and Zacatecas ordered their respective state congresses to repeal the crimes of self-induced and consensual abortion. In January of this year, the SCJN approved General Declaration of Unconstitutionality 01/2024, which unanimously invalidated, with general effects, the provisions in the Criminal Code of Chihuahua that criminalized abortion without exception, thereby rendering them inoperative. In February, the Congress of Campeche amended its Criminal Code, and in May, Yucatán complied with the Court’s ruling ordering it to decriminalize abortion. In both states, abortion was decriminalized up to 12.6 weeks of pregnancy.

Of the federal entities in Mexico where abortion has been decriminalized, only ten (Baja California, Baja California Sur, Mexico City, Colima, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and San Luis Potosí) have incorporated the regulation of termination of pregnancy services into their local health laws. Moreover, only Mexico City, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Michoacán have designed and published specific abortion care programs. These programs were developed as public policy instruments to regulate the provision of abortion services in order to ensure quality and comprehensive care. In addition, in November 2022, the National Center for Gender Equity and Reproductive Health (CNEGSR, for its Spanish initials) published the Technical Guidelines for the Provision of Safe  Abortion Care in Mexico, which establish, at the federal level, the basic criteria for providing comprehensive abortion care from a gender perspective and in accordance with human rights standards.

To date, only Mexico City’s LTP Program and the Nayarit Health Services conduct systematic statistical monitoring of the services provided. This monitoring is particularly relevant, as disaggregated data makes it possible to analyze both the quality of abortion care and the sociodemographic profile of service users. However, in the case of Mexico City, this information has not been published on a regular basis since June 2024. The most recent update includes cumulative data from that date through July 2025, but it is presented in a different format and with a lower level of disaggregation. Systematized and publicly available information on health services in Mexico City is updated on Mexico City Health Secretariat’s website on LTP (Interrupción Legal del Embarazo). It is also available as open data—although only for the first half of 2022—on Mexico City’s Open Data portal. In turn, statistical information for Nayarit can be found on the state’s Health Services website, under the transparency section.

One tool does allow health care personnel from any entity where abortion has been decriminalized to record induced abortions: the Health Information System (SIS, for its Spanish initials). “Technical Memorandum No. 4: Recording Information in the Provision of Safe Abortion Care” and the training module “Registration and Coding of Care for Sexual Violence, Including VTP,” issued by the Mexican Center for the Classification of Diseases (Cemece, for its Spanish acronym), specify the procedure for registering these types of abortions. The recorded data are available through the dynamic comorbidity cubes for hospital discharges, which serve as a tool for consulting and generating health information.

Proper use of this tool would make it possible to obtain comparable statistical information across federal entities and to assess the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of induced abortion care. When GIRE consulted the database, it found that information is not being collected adequately. This may be due to a lack of awareness of the tool or of appropriate registration procedures.

In addition to potential obstacles in recording the information, accessing it once published is also complex. First, viewing the dynamic comorbidity cubes for hospital discharges requires installing additional programs or browser extensions. Second, analyzing the data requires technical and specialized knowledge, as induced abortion is coded in accordance with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).

The only two documents in which this information can be identified are the training module and the technical memorandum mentioned above. However, the Safe Abortion Observatory (Observas, for its Spanish acronym) represents a coordinated civil society effort to process and publish these data in an accessible manner. The statistical indicators generated through this initiative are available on this organization’s website.

The available statistical information on induced abortions makes it possible to determine whether the service is being provided and under what conditions, as well as to identify whether there is significant demand from populations that may require specialized care, such as pregnant people who are Indigenous, persons with disabilities, migrants, and individuals with non-normative gender identities (including trans, non-binary, gender fluid, or agender people, among others). Given the lack of disaggregated statistical data on these populations, it is not possible to identify their specific needs for each federal entity or hospital unit.

To adequately monitor access to abortion, statistical data must include specific information on abortion care and on service users. In this regard, questions submitted through access-to- information requests serve two purposes: first, to use the responses of the obligated entities to determine who is accessing the service, where they access it, and through which methods; and second, to identify those state and federal health institutions that lack the necessary records to generate this information. On this basis, the section below presents the disaggregation indicator proposed by GIRE. Its purpose is to use a scoring system to summarize how health institutions provide information and the level of disaggregation with which they do so.

The first step in designing the indicator was to classify the levels of disaggregation for each institution. The order of importance assigned to each level reflects its relevance for assessing access to comprehensive and safe abortion care. Accordingly, a scoring model was developed to indicate the degree of disaggregation, the classification applied, and the score assigned to the information recorded. Institutions that lack records or provide incorrect information receive a negative score of –5.

The scores are divided into three categories, and the score assigned to each entity corresponds to the month in which it submitted its information. The first category assesses the level of temporal disaggregation: entities that provide data disaggregated by day and by month receive higher scores, followed by those that report only annual totals. Entities that report only the total number of abortions performed receive no points in this category. The second category is based on the WHO Abortion Care Guideline and on GIRE’s experience, and reflects the minimum variables required to assess access to safe abortion care. These variables include gestational age (in weeks), age, method of termination, health care unit, disability status, gender identity, belonging to an Indigenous community, and/or migration or mobility status. Each variable receives the same score—positive or negative—depending on whether it is recorded. Finally, the third category includes variables that are not strictly necessary to profile service users but that are statistically relevant and useful for the design and implementation of public policies: social security enrollment and place of residence. Each of these variables receives the same score when recorded; if not recorded, no points are assigned.