Abortion in Belgium

[2][3] The pregnant woman is required to receive counselling at least six days prior to the abortion and to check in with her doctor to monitor her health in the weeks after the procedure.

However, very few prosecutions of abortions took place until 1923, when a bill originally submitted by Henry Carton de Wiart from the Catholic Party in 1913 (but not formally debated until after World War I) was passed by the Belgian Parliament to formally state legal penalties for incitement to abortion as well as advertising and promotion of contraception.

He spent 34 days in prison; demonstrations for his release and in favour of a revision of the law were attended by several hundred thousand people.

[citation needed] Due to the influence of the Catholic Church, and the personal faith of King Baudouin, Belgium remained one of a small number of European countries where abortion was illegal after liberal changes in the law in other jurisdictions in the 1960s and 1970s.

[10] The bishops warned Belgian Catholics that anyone who co-operated "effectively and directly" in the procurement of abortions was "excluding themselves from the ecclesiastical community."

Motivated by the strong stance of the Belgian bishops, and the fact that he and his wife Queen Fabiola had not been able to bear any children themselves, King Baudouin notified the Prime Minister, Wilfried Martens, on 30 March 1990 that he could not sign the law without violating his conscience as a Catholic.

[11] Since the legislation would not have the force of law without the king's signature (royal assent), his refusal to sign created the potential for a constitutional crisis.

Baudouin died in 1993 and Pope John Paul II paid respects at his grave in the Church of Our Lady of Laeken during an official visit to the country in 1995.

In those proposals, the legal term limit would be increased to 18 weeks and the reflection period would be shortened to 48 hours, compared to six days.

[24] In a survey carried out by the secularist group Centre d'action laïque in 2018, 75.4% of respondents stated that abortion should not be a crime, 16.6% disagreed, and 5.7% said they are neither for nor against, and 2.3% were unable or unwilling to provide an answer.