That case had the benefit of a vocal and angry person to speak on the dead woman's behalf -- her husband, Praveen. He has said she requested a termination that may have saved her life -- but was told, "This is a Catholic country." (An official inquiry by the hospital has yet to be released, and Praveen Halapannavar is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.) But for every Savita, there are thousands of women whose names we don't know, women who aren't even counted.

The most commonly cited statistic suggests that complications from unsafe abortions led to approximately 13 percent of maternal deaths worldwide. That's a World Health Organization figure first arrived at in 2000, which hasn't been re-evaluated. Every year, when WHO says how many women have died from unsafe abortions, they're simply taking the same percentage of the global maternal mortality figure -- 56,000 in 2003, or 47,000 in 2008. But one epidemiologist, Caitlin Gerdts, wondered if that number wasn't a potentially vast understatement.

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