Abortion in the United States

Abortion in the United States has been and remains one of the most controversial issues in United States culture and politics. Various anti-abortion laws have been in force in each state since at least 1900.

Before the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, it was already legal in several states, but the decision imposed a uniform framework for state legislation on the subject. It established a minimal period during which abortion must be legal (with more or fewer restrictions throughout the pregnancy). That basic framework, modified in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), remains nominally in place, although the effective availability of abortion varies significantly from state to state, as many counties have no abortion providers.

In the United States, the main actors in the abortion debate are most often labeled either as "pro-choice" or "pro-life", though shades of opinion exist, and most Americans are considered to be somewhere in the middle. A Gallup.com survey of 1014 adults found that opinions on abortion in the United States remain nearly evenly split, with 46% of participants identifying as pro-life and 47% identifying as pro-choice. The poll results also indicated that Americans harbor a diverse and shifting set of opinions on the legal status of abortion in the US; the survey polled that only 28% of respondents believed abortion should be legal under unlimited circumstances, and 48% of respondents believed that abortion should be legal under "most" or "only a few circumstances." Recent polling results also found that only 34% of Americans were satisfied with abortion laws in the United States.

The abortion debate most commonly relates to the "induced abortion" of an embryo or fetus at some point in a pregnancy, which is also how the term is used in a legal sense. Some also use the term "elective abortion", which is used in relation to a claim to an unrestricted right of a woman to an abortion, whether or not she chooses to have one.

In medical parlance, "abortion" can refer to either miscarriage or abortion until the fetus is viable. After viability, doctors call an abortion a "termination of pregnancy".

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