IN America, many state governments have tried to curb abortion by placing severe restrictions on providers and clinics, purportedly for women’s protection, despite opposition from the American Medical Association and other groups. If the limits are allowed to stand, self-induced abortions are expected to rise, leading to an escalation of health dangers to women, particularly those who can’t afford to travel for help.

In India, a curious inversion of this story is playing out: The government is trying to reduce the qualifications required of providers so that poor women will have easier access to abortions, while doctors are the ones opposing this relaxation of rules.

Abortion is allowed in India under relatively liberal conditions — for example, contraception failure. Although its legal status is uncontroversial, the topic itself, like all sexual matters, is nevertheless taboo in the religiously conservative country. Women must often deal with unwanted pregnancy in secret, a problem compounded by unmet contraception needs and widespread gender subjugation.

The lack of adequate medical facilities in rural areas and urban slums forces many women to try to terminate pregnancies themselves, or to seek the services of quacks and untrained midwives. Ipas, an international abortion care organization, estimates that about five million abortions were carried out in India in 2013, with more than half of them unsafe. On average, an Indian woman dies every two hours from such procedures, and perhaps a hundred times as many are left with temporary or lifelong disabilities.