But abortion-related deaths are much less common than they were a few decades ago, especially in countries with functional health-care systems. Since the early ’90s, abortion fatalities have declined by 42 percent globally. This is despite the fact that about 45 percent of all the abortions in the world are still performed in “unsafe” circumstances—meaning without the help of a trained professional or with an outdated medical method. Unsafe abortions are more common in countries where the practice is illegal.

While fewer women are perforating their uterus or dying of sepsis, if women who attempt to perform their own abortion are taken to the hospital with complications, they might be reported to the authorities and face jail time.

When Michelle Oberman, a Santa Clara University law professor, began her research on abortion in El Salvador, where abortion is outlawed, she expected to enter hospital wards full of women dying of perforated uteruses. But that isn’t quite what she found.

For one thing, doctors have gotten better at controlling bleeding in recent decades. But there has also been a major revolution in how clandestine abortions are performed. Since the 1970s, women around the world have been able to take a common and cheap stomach-ulcer drug, misoprostol, to end their pregnancies without anyone knowing. It’s even more effective when taken in combination with another drug, mifepristone.

Read: Pro-abortion-rights activists won in Ireland, but not Argentina.

The drug combination has made it so that in Brazil alone, since 1992, the treatment rate for severe complications from abortion has declined by 76 percent. In Latin America overall, the rate of complications from abortions declined by a third since 2005. Meanwhile, the rate of abortions there has only increased.

Even though abortion is illegal in El Salvador, one in three pregnancies still ends in abortion, Oberman says. Many women there who want to abort their pregnancies do it by finding misoprostol on the street. Those who have internet access and reading skills can look up information about how to take it properly.

According to Oberman, those who do die from abortion-related causes in the country fall into roughly three categories, none of which resembles a case like Elizabeth’s in Argentina. First, some doctors refuse to treat pregnant women with chemotherapy or other potent medications because they are worried they might harm the fetus. Second, some doctors allow ectopic pregnancies—in which a fertilized egg grows outside the womb and can’t survive to birth—to continue until the woman’s fallopian tube explodes, because they fear that eggs in even ectopic pregnancies will be considered living beings under the law. In the third category are teenage girls who kill themselves because they are distraught over their pregnancies. These teenage deaths account for three-eighths of all maternal deaths in El Salvador.