system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Based on statistics from countries which currently do not allow legal abortions, if the US were to make abortion illegal, how common would illegal abortion be? What would the health risks be?

I'll try to word this in an ideologically neutral way.  I might not succeed.

I've been seeing a lot of coat hanger imagery coming from the (American) left as the abortion debate returns to the media, arguing that shutting down abortion clinics will result in dangerous back alley abortions.  However, it seems like a visceral/emotional argument, rather than one backed by data.

Since there are currently countries that do not allow legal abortions, can we use those as a predictive model?  Do these countries have a high rate of illegal abortion procedures?  Are there any statistics on the rate of injury/death resulting from these procedures?

And if there are are statistics available, is it fair to compare them to the US?  For example, in Ireland, if it's easier to just travel to the UK rather than seek an illegal operation on Irish soil, would Ireland only be a useful predictor of those parts of the US that are about an Ireland-length away from the Canadian border?

Is there data to support the fear that anti-abortion legislation will result in a rash of dangerous, illegal abortion procedures in the US?
gpt
A question to the OP.  In countries that do not allow legal abortion, how likely is it that any estimates of the actual abortion rate are reliable and non-noisy?

You are better off comparing states in the US who border each other, where both states had policy X at time t, and at time t+1 state 1 had policy X and state 2 had policy Y,  This would be a simple difference in difference , or boundary condition study.  Likely, you'd want to have data on abortions per birth or abortions per women for the counties that are on each side of the border (more likely to be similiar demographics)

I would caution using other countries to base predictions on what happens in the US.  Wayyyyy to many different rules, laws customs , etc.