Developments in abortion policy in a context of illegality: The Belgian case from 1971 until 1990

On 3 April 1990, a new abortion law was passed in Belgium, replacingthe one from 1867. This change took approximately 20 years andresulted from a strong political debate, a number of proposalsfor legal reforms and from prosecutions of physicians, socialworkers and women having performed terminations of pregnancies(TOP). During this period, health professionals set up a sortof ‘illegal reform programme’. They were not onlysuccessful in organizing decentralized, accessible and non-profitTOP facilities, but also effective in producing the first datasets to monitor TOP requests in the country. In this way, theymodified TOP medical activity and practice and participatedgreatly in changing abortion from a situation characterizedby secrecy and danger before 1970, to a medical activity legalizedafter 1990. Legal TOP statistics published since 1990 cannotbe explained without taking into account this period of transitionwhere spedflc features of the following situation were prepared.