The Choice of Termination Act is enacted by the Parliament of South Africa

From February 1 1997, the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act was enacted by the Parliament of South Africa, granting unrestricted access to abortion to any woman no more than 13 weeks pregnant. The act was dubbed one of the most “liberal abortion laws in the world”. It starkly contrasted with the access available under the Apartheid-era Abortion and Sterilisation Act of 1975 under which abortion access was extremely limited to certain circumstances, and then only after a rigorous and lengthy application process.

According to one report, only 40% of women who applied for state-sanctioned abortions successfully underwent the procedure. The inaccessibility under Apartheid contributed to the deaths of at least thousands of women who underwent illegal and unsafe abortions. In direct opposition to this, the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act was enacted to protect reproductive health rights by providing safe abortion access. This accessibility has decreased the number of abortion-related fatalities by nearly 90% but illegal and unsafe abortion practitioners continue to operate in SA.

Under the democratic dispensation, the right to abortion access is protected by the constitution and bill of rights, which stipulates reproductive rights as a basic human right. However, this has not gone unchallenged. On the 10th of July 1998, three pro-birth organisations lost an appeal in the Pretoria Supreme Court that claimed that the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act was unconstitutional because it violated the right to life. The court ruled in favour of the Department of Health who argued that constitutional rights are afforded to living people before they can be applied to unborn foetuses.