Comparative Abortion Policy Index for Countries 1992-2023

The Comparative Abortion Policy Index (CAPI) dataset measures the permissiveness of national abortion laws on a scale from zero to seven. It was developed by Forman-Rabinovici and Sommer and updated by Gabriela Alvarado to cover all countries through 2023. The data is hosted by Harvard Dataverse and was last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze trends in the total CAPI score over the 1992-2023 period for specific countries.
• Model the relationship between individual grounds for abortion and the overall policy index score.
• Use the binary change variable to identify years when a country's total CAPI score shifted.
• Investigate the direction of policy change (increase/decrease variable) following legal reforms.
• Compare policy permissiveness trajectories across different regions or country groupings.

Strengths

• Time series covering a 32-year period from 1992 to 2023.
• Data triangulated from three authoritative sources: UN reports, WHO database, and Center for Reproductive Rights.

Limitations

• Specific row count, column count, and sample size are unknown.
• The dataset's completeness for all countries across all years is not verified.

Provenance

Source

United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs, World Health Organization (WHO) Global Abortion Policies Database, Center for Reproductive Rights.

Collection Method

Triangulation of sources to expand and update the original CAPI index.

Time Range

1992 to 2023

Freshness

Updated through 2023; metadata last updated April 2026.

Geography

Global coverage of countries.