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Objectives: Four revised versions of Taiwan's abortion legislation were proposed in 2012 and raised controversy. Legislators led by Li-huan Yang proposed a six-day 'mandatory waiting periods' coupled with 'mandatory counseling'. Legislators led by Shi-bao Lai proposed 'consent from two doctors'. Both of these aimed to reduce the abortion rate and increase the birth rate. The Administrative Yuan for its part proposed a 'mandatory waiting period' of three days plus 'mandatory counseling'. And finally, legislators led by Yi-chen Wu proposed that medical institutions should provide all kinds of information related to abortion', and that local government 'should provide birth counseling to citizens'. This paper aims at analyzing the controversy. Methods: Three methods are adopted. (1) Discourse analysis is applied on documents collected from legal and medical research papers, government data and news reports. (2) Descriptive statistics is applied on two surveys conducted in 2007 and 2008 on women and obgynecologists nationwide respectively. (3) Text analysis is applied to the written texts provided by women and ob-gynecologists on some open-ended questions in the survey. Results: The 'Mandatory waiting periods' as proposed by Yang and the Administrative Yuan is found to lack consideration of reality, as our survey shows that most women considering the terminating of an unplanned pregnancy have already been thinking much longer than the stipulated period, typically having already done this for periods ranging from over one week to a whole month. As regards 'mandatory counseling', this is found to be in violation of human rights and professional ethics. As to 'consent from two doctors', this is found to create difficulties for women, and is opposed by a majority of ob-gynecologists. Conclusions: Two types of discourse appear in the controversy, the 'restrictive and controlling discourse' receives little support from academic research, or in surveys of women and physicians, and also runs counter to the professional ethics of counseling. Many research findings have shown that 'Mandatory waiting periods' do not contribute to the reduction of the abortion rate. The 'women centered discourse' reflects the women's needs and practice on the matter, and the 'patient centered discourse' practiced by ob-gynecologists can give support to 'women centered discourse'. As for an effective reduction of abortion rate, the paper finds that policy makers would achieve greater success by promoting greater use of contraceptives, and improving economic and social welfare, thus enabling women to consider keeping unplanned fetuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]