Abortion - Worldwide Rate Stopped Falling After 2003 - NYTimes.com Daniel Etter for The New York Times A pregnant woman and her companion wait in front of a closed Primar Health Sub-Center in India. The world's abortion rate, which began declining steadily in the 1990s, has stopped falling, according to a new study. The study, published online last week in The Lancet, was done by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, which studies sexuality and reproductive health. Globally, abortions fell from 35 per 1,000 women in 1995 to 29 per 1,000 by 2003. After that, the rate essentially leveled off. The study blamed a decline in access to birth control. "When contraception rates are high, abortion rates are low," Gilda Sedgh, a senior research associate at the institute and the lead author of the new study, said in an interview. Birth control may have declined as the fight against AIDS, malaria and other diseases diverted dollars from it, she added. The United States is the biggest donor toward birth control in poor countries, but those funds leveled off as the Bush administration poured money into AIDS drugs, mosquito nets and other health measures. European donors "tried to fill the void but couldn't," Dr. Sedgh said. Paradoxically, countries where abortion is illegal often have more abortions, the study found. For example, abortion rates are far higher in Africa and Latin America - where abortions are illegal or heavily restricted - than in the United States and Western Europe. But in South Africa, where they are legal, the abortion rate is the continent's lowest. After South Africa liberalized its abortion law in 1997, Dr. Sedgh said, maternal deaths from unsafe abortions fell by 90 percent.