The decriminalisation of abortion in Tunisia: From Neo-Malthusianism to conservatism

To date, Tunisia remains a unique North-African and Arab country because it has legalized abortion on demand. The decision to decriminalise abortion was made under the postcolonial state’s demographic policies to lower the natality rate rather than a result of women’s struggles, although some women’s organisations promoted the procedure. With the support of various international agencies, frontal campaigns of family planning - which included several forms of coercion - started in the late 1960s following the neo-Malthusian rationality that the United States imposed on the Global South during the Cold War. The assumption of the Tunisian modernist elite was that the country’s socioeconomic development was possible only if the population did not exceed the available resources. This chapter traces the history of abortion depenalisation by setting it in the larger history of the Tunisian state’s demographic and public health policies from the colonial era to the present. It highlights that access to abortion care in the public sector has progressively become more troublesome after the demographic transition took place at the end of the 1990s. The 2011 revolution and the pandemic have contributed to make the situation even more complex, although the law was not changed and, officially, government facilities should continue to offer free abortions to all Tunisian citizens. It describes first the rationale of demographic colonial policies and later examine the reforms that the independent political elite launched to modernise local society and favour the country’s economic development. It also analyses the obstacles women attending government facilities must face to receive abortion care, especially after the 2011 revolution. The conclusion focus on remarks on abortion care access since the beginning of the pandemic, which are based on two preliminary studies conducted in 2020 and 2021.