NEW ZEALAND: Abortion legalised

Decades of campaigning by the women’s rights movement paid off in New Zealand on 18 March, when the government passed a landmark bill that decriminalised abortion. The previous law had allowed abortion only in cases of rape, incest, foetal abnormality, or when the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman was at serious risk; for other cases, it imposed jail terms of up to 14 years. Although the law was never fully enforced, access to abortions required women to go through a complicated process of ‘proving’ that they experienced serious mental issues as a result of unwanted pregnancy, a hurdle that particularly worked against women from excluded groups.