IRELAND

Legal status:  Abortion is banned in Ireland, except in cases where the mother's life is in danger. An amendment banning abortion was added to the Irish constitution in 1983 to preempt a Roe v. Wade-style legal challenge.

Controversy: Abortion rights groups estimate that more than 100,000 Irish women have traveled to the United Kingdom to obtain abortions since 1983, a practice that was formally legalized in 1992. Irish voters under 35 overwhelmingly support overturning the ban, possibly a result of the Catholic Church's declining influence in the Republic.

Anti-abortion groups won't give up without a fight, however, and in recent years have invited leaders from the U.S. anti-abortion movement to Ireland to discuss tactics for opposing legal challenges to the ban. The abortion controversy resurfaced last year in the debate over ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, a proposed EU measure to deepen European integration. "No" campaigners spread false rumors that the treaty would give the EU control over Irish abortion laws; despite emphatic denials from the Irish government and the archbishop of Dublin, fears over abortion were likely a significant reason why Irish voters rejected the treaty.

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Legal status: A proposed constitutional amendment would ban abortion in all circumstances, even in cases of rape and when the mother's life is in danger.

Controversy: In April, the Dominican Republic's congress gave preliminary approval to a new constitutional amendment stating that, "the right to life is inviolable from conception until death." The amendment has not yet gone into effect, and efforts by opponents to add exceptions to the bill have been unsuccessful. The new law extends the ban to "therapeutic abortion," meant to protect the life of the mother, as well as the morning-after pill. The Dominican Catholic Church lobbied hard for the amendment.

Dominican women's rights groups protested the decision, demonstrating in front of the Senate shouting slogans like "No Rosaries on Our Ovaries." The medical community has protested the decision as well, predicting that deaths from illegal abortions would skyrocket. And in an unusual move, the country coordinator for the United Nations Development Program blasted the church over its lobbying for the amendment, saying that "dogma is placed ahead of the needs of the population, health, housing, and better living conditions."

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KENYA

Legal status: Abortion is illegal in Kenya, except when the mother's life is in danger. However, the law is very rarely enforced.

Controversy: Despite being banned since 1897, abortion is relatively common in Kenya; an estimated 300,000 of the procedures are performed every year. The main effect of the ban is to make safe abortions performed by doctors prohibitively expensive for many Kenyan women. As a result, more than 20,000 are hospitalized every year for complications from botched abortions. Women's groups and doctors have lobbied to change the law, describing it as "incongruent with and uninformed by the ground reality." A bill was introduced in parliament last year that would have made Kenya only the second African country (after South Africa) to legalize abortion, but in this deeply religious country, it never really stood a chance. Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups have had little success in lobbying the government to actually enforce the laws on the books.

Kenyan health providers also feel the fallout from the U.S. abortion debate. Because of the United States' "Mexico City Policy" preventing groups that promote abortion from receiving U.S. financial support, many Kenyan family planning clinics lost their funding. The policy was recently rescinded by President Barack Obama.

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MEXICO

Legal status: Laws differ depending on the state. In most states, abortion is banned, except for cases of rape, birth defects, or to protect the mother's health. In Mexico City, abortion on demand is permitted for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Controversy: Mexico City's legislative assembly sent shockwaves throughout the world's second-largest Catholic country and indeed the rest of Latin America in 2007 when it voted to legalize abortion in the first trimester. Anti-abortion groups mounted a legal challenge to the new law, but it was upheld by Mexico's supreme court in August 2008. The backlash has been massive. Since the law went into effect, 12 of Mexico's 32 states have approved constitutional amendments defining human eggs as people with legal rights. Abortion rights groups worry that the amendments will lead to further restrictions of criminal codes, which currently allow abortion in some circumstances.

Nearly 900,000 illegal abortions are performed every year in Mexico and the country has one of the highest abortion rates in the developing world. In 2006, Human Rights Watch sharply criticized the Mexican government after a report found that officials frequently prevent rape victims from obtaining abortions, in violation of Mexican law.

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SPAIN

Legal status: For the moment, abortion is illegal except of cases of rape, fetal malformation, or when the mother's health is in danger. Doctors frequently get around the existing law by citing the mother's mental health as a reason for the abortion.

Controversy: Having already legalized gay marriage, and liberalized divorce laws, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero stepped onto the most treacherous battlefield of Spain's culture wars with a proposal to reform the law to allow abortion on demand until the 14th week of pregnancy. The Catholic Church has launched a massive advertising campaign to prevent the reform from being passed. In one controversial episode, a nun teaching at a partially state-funded school was caught showing her high school class a slideshow of dismembered fetuses interspersed with Zapatero's grinning face.

The law still needs to be approved by parliament, where Zapatero's Socialists lack a majority. Opponents have zeroed in on a provision of the law that would allow women as young as 16 to receive an abortion without parental notification. A strong majority of Spanish voters, including more than half of socialists, oppose this provision.