Methodology

Official data has been obtained from these 10 countries. Only women traveling to the aforementioned countries have been counted. It is a different matter when considering the countries they travel from. In that case, European countries refers to those that are part of the European Union, as well as those that are or have been members or candidate countries of the Council of Europe.

Some countries—such as Spain, Lithuania, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic—have provided information on all foreign women who have had an abortion within their borders. However, most countries only provide this data for the larger flows. France only provided data for women from other European countries as a whole. In many instances, data on smaller flows is not available due to data protection regulations or concerns regarding statistical confidentiality—that is also the reason why many countries refuse to provide any data on this matter.

The data is based on a breakdown by the women’s country of residence. The Czech Republic and Switzerland are exceptions. Both countries consider women without permanent residence as foreigners, but categorise them by nationality. In these two cases, the country’s criteria have been followed. For the total number of foreign women who have had an abortion in these countries, the same criterion is applied (different residence), but for specific flows, the data is categorised by nationality rather than country of residence.

In the Czech Republic, the data is based on administrative records. Until 2022, a foreign woman without permanent residence was determined by having a citizenship other than Czech citizenship and not having a completed residence in the Czech Republic. From 2023 onwards, foreign women without permanent residence are considered to be those who have not been identified through the central population registers. The country also began collecting data on the country of residence of foreign women who have an abortion in 2023, but as a pilot project and without verifying the data. Therefore, there is no complete information on this variable that would be comparable to the data from other countries.

Switzerland also recently started collecting data on non-resident women who have an abortion in the country. This began in 2022, and even today, this information is only available in half of the cantons, due to the federal system, in which cantons are the health authorities in Switzerland. Therefore, for this country, data is only available for the last two years collected by Exporting Abortion, and the women without residence in Switzerland are counted, but the flows are broken down by nationality.

Switzerland is not the only exception where data for the full five years has not been included. For the UK, only data from 2019 to 2022 is included, as 2023 data has not been published yet. For Belgium, only data from 2019 to 2021 is included, as data for 2022 and 2023 has not been published either. Both countries are among the few that publish them directly, and it has not been necessary to request the data. But both have refused to provide to Exporting Abortion the data for the years they have not yet published or to clarify the exact publication date.

Another country with particularities in its data is France. In addition to not including abortions for medical reasons in the overall figures—because it is considered a different medical procedure from abortions on request and, therefore, they are not counted together—, data on European women having abortions in the country has only been collected for metropolitan France, as this is the part of the state located on the mainland. However, this data has only been provided for abortions that took place in hospitals. In contrast, the total number of non-resident women who have had an abortion in France has been obtained for the country as a whole, not just metropolitan France, and includes abortions that took place in all types of health centres.

For each country, Exporting Abortion has sought to obtain the total annual number of abortions performed on non-resident women, the number of abortions performed on European women, and the breakdown by specific countries to analyse the concrete flows. All of these criteria have been applied to data based on official national statistics. There are some limitations, as data is not available for all countries, or in some cases, women’s residency may have been inaccurately recorded—particularly in neighbouring countries. However, these are the most concrete and precise figures available at present. In fact, due to the lack of data in some countries, the figures only represent the tip of the iceberg.

As many countries do not collect or publish this information, Exporting Abortion made an exception and included the annual data for the number of Polish women assisted by Ciocia Basia to travel to Germany for an abortion, and by Ciocia Wienia for the same purpose to Austria. Experts have identified both organisations as the primary sources of assistance for women travelling on these routes, and the data has been verified with multiple sources within these organisations.The data from Ciocia Basia mainly consists of women from Poland who live in Poland, but some may live in Poland but come from other countries. However, these two flows only represent part of the actual number of women who have used these routes to access an abortion. For this reason, they have not been included in the rankings of major flows in Europe compiled by Exporting Abortion. They are, however, included in figures such as the total number of European women travelling each year for an abortion and they are represented in some charts to visualise the existence of these flows, even with partial data.

Due to the type of data collected and analysed—total annual number of abortions—, when stories or charts refer to a number of women, they technically refer to the number of abortions carried out by those women, as the same woman may have had more than one, although this is not the most common. Similarly, when referring to women from a specific place, it usually refers to women who reside there.