Abortion in Lebanon, between the law and the body

Names have been changed and identifying details withheld to protect the people who spoke for this piece.

On paper, abortion in Lebanon was settled in 1943. In practice, it is decided every day, by women whose circumstances the law was never written to accommodate.

Lebanon's Penal Code, drafted under the French Mandate, criminalizes abortion under Articles 539-546. A woman who ends her own pregnancy can face six months to three years in prison; anyone who performs the procedure faces the same or harsher penalties. The single legal exception is when continuing the pregnancy would endanger the mother's life, requiring sign-off from two additional physicians. There is no exception for rape, incest, or fetal abnormality, and none has been added since 1969. Layered on top is Lebanon's sectarian architecture, eighteen recognized religious communities govern personal status through their own courts, so the moral framework a woman faces depends partly on which sect she was born into. No official body tracks how many abortions happen each year. What exists instead is a shadow system, a network of trusted doctors, that women navigate largely alone.

A Lebanese gynecologist, speaking anonymously

"I have been practicing for many years," the doctor said, "and I have encountered hundreds of women seeking abortions or advice about unintended or medically complicated pregnancies. There is no single abortion story." Her patients range from very young women to married mothers who cannot safely continue another pregnancy, to those who discover severe fetal abnormalities or face pregnancies that threaten their own health.

Methods vary by circumstance, she explained, medication abortion, which uses drugs to stop an early pregnancy from developing, or procedural abortion, whose specifics depend on gestational stage and the patient's condition. But whatever the method, one question comes first. "'Will I be okay?' That is often the first thing they ask. Not 'Will I regret it?' Not 'What will people think?' Sometimes they ask me that while they are crying."

She pushed back on the idea that women who seek abortions simply don't want children. "A married woman can desperately want a pregnancy and still need to terminate it because continuing it could put her life in danger. Those contradictions are real." The hardest part of her work, she said, “is the stigma and the fear, secrecy, judgment, legal consequences. By the time women reach me, they may already be terrified." And the aftermath can include a whirlwind of emotion, "a woman can feel relief and grief simultaneously. Medicine can explain what's happening physically. It cannot dictate what she's supposed to feel afterward."

Raya, 22: "I wasn't ready to be a mother"

Raya found out she was pregnant because of a late period, a test, two lines she stared at "for what felt like forever." She is 22, with a boyfriend her own age, neither of them married or prepared to become parents. Then came a second shock: twins. "I remember thinking, how am I supposed to have one baby when I don't even know how to take care of myself yet? And now there are two?"

She hid the pregnancy from her mother, more afraid of that conversation than of the pregnancy itself. When she finally told her, her mother asked, "What do you want to do?" Raya decided she couldn't continue. "People might hear that and think I didn't care. I cared too much. I didn't have the emotional stability, the financial independence, or the life I thought a child deserved." With no legal path forward, her mother reached out to their family gynecologist, who agreed to help privately.

"Everyone talks about abortion as if it's one moment," Raya said. "For me it was hours and days and months of emotions." She still thinks about it constantly, sees twins on the street and looks away, calculates ages, wonders. "I made a decision I still carry with me. I feel the pain every single day. I pray to god that my babies are in heaven, and that perhaps one day when I’m ready, they might return to me.”

Soraya, 31: "I had already imagined the child"

Soraya's pregnancy was planned and wanted. She and her husband had started choosing names before doctors discovered she had severe pulmonary arterial hypertension, a heart and lung condition that made continuing the pregnancy potentially fatal. "I kept asking, 'but how serious?' I wanted someone to say everything would be fine. They couldn't say that."

When her doctor told her the pregnancy could kill her, she and her husband sat in silence. "You are asking me to choose between my baby and myself. I hated that sentence, because it wasn't really a choice." She survived, and felt relief, but also loss. "I left the hospital thinking, I was pregnant yesterday. My body was still tired. My mind was still pregnant."

Because she was married and the abortion was medically necessary, people around her assumed it was easy, telling her she could simply try again. "They didn't understand. I had already imagined a child. I had already started loving that child." She still grieves. "I don't regret surviving. But survival doesn't erase grief. 'Necessary' doesn't mean easy. It doesn't mean I wasn't a mother already in my heart."

The gap that remains

Between the penal code and the exam room, between religious doctrine and a mother asking her daughter what she wants to do, there is a wide, largely invisible space where Lebanese women actually make these decisions.

What these accounts reveal is a system running in parallel to the official one, informal, dependent on trust and connections. This is evidence that women make these decisions anyway. The debate, ultimately, is larger than the procedure itself. It is about what happens when legislation, medicine, morality and individual circumstances collide, and about the women left to navigate that collision, often in silence.