CSB: female immigrants have abortions twice as often as natives of Israel

At the same time, the share of approved applications from their total number continues to grow from 90% in the late 1980s to 99.8% in 2024.

In 92.1% of cases, the requested termination of pregnancy was carried out.

The most common reason for approving termination of pregnancy was “pregnancy out of wedlock” – 43.3% of requests. This is followed by “the risk of physical or mental malformation of the fetus” (23.3%) and “the risk to the woman’s health” (21.6%).

51.2% of those who applied were married women, 38.2% were unmarried, 10.2% were divorced and 0.3% were widows. Since 2008, there has been a gradual increase in the proportion of married women among those who applied.

By age: 41.4% of calls came from women under 30 years old, 45.7% from women 30–39 years old and 13.0% from women 40 years old and older.

Of these, 5.8% of those who applied (853 girls) were under 19 years of age. For comparison, in 2006 their share was 14.3% of the total number of applicants to the commission.

Among immigrant women, the conversion rate was 7.9 per thousand, while among Jewish women born in Israel – 6.5 per thousand. The gap is especially noticeable at the age of 15–24 years, where the indicators differ almost twice: at the age of 15–19 years – 4.7 per thousand for repatriates versus 2.6 per thousand for “Sabr” women, at the age of 20–24 years – 11.1 versus 6.4, respectively.

In 2024, 3,378 applications were approved due to concerns about fetal defects. However, only in 1838 of them (54.4%) the diagnosis of malformations or prenatal conditions that could with certainty or high probability lead to fetal damage was confirmed. In 31.4% of cases approved on this basis, the reason was the use of drugs during pregnancy that could pose a threat to the fetus. The remaining cases included a maternal disease that could harm the fetus, the presence of an intrauterine device, a reduction in the number of embryos, and others.