Legal Abortion Saves Lives

Illegal abortion is a human rights violation and a public health disaster. “Pro-life” policies are wreaking havoc world-wide, killing and injuring women and perpetuating inequality. First, we have Trinidad and Tobago:

For seven years ASPIRE has planted its abortion law reform lobby on public health ground. The NGO has cited disturbing statistics culled from Ministry of Health records: every year three to four thousand women are treated in public hospitals due to complications arising from unsafe abortion. Thousands more are never admitted.

The premise of abortion law reform is that our nineteenth century criminal legislation fails utterly as a deterrent. Instead, it creates a furtive, unfettered environment in which women are often injured, sometimes killed.

The studies bear this out. A 1997 Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) report identified unsafe abortion as the country’s second leading cause of death during pregnancy. (Ectopic or “outside the wounds” pregnancy comes in first and, in several cases, are linked to prior unsafe terminations.) And the World Health Organisation (WHO) has named Trinidad and Tobago among the countries in this region where unsafe abortion is the number one cause of illness and injury to pregnant women.

“Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures,” asserts a 2003 WHO document, “Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems”. But that safety is hinged upon several conditions: whether procedures are performed by trained healthcare providers with proper equipment, correct technique and sanitary standards. Worldwide, nearly half of the 46 million induced abortions that occur every year are unsafe.

Then there’s Uganda:

The study provides the appalling information that as many as 1200 Ugandan women die every year as a result of unsafe abortions. Also, “Roughly one in five of the estimated 297,000 women who have an abortion every year – a total of 65,000 women – suffer complications that require medical care but do not get treatment in a medical facility.” These deaths, and the post-abortion complications, mainly result from abortion being illegal in Uganda.

The result is that women perform abortions by all sorts of means. Some overdose on aspirins; some swallow detergents like Omo; others stick coat hangers – or the plant Nanda, which has bad toxic effects – up their private parts. But increasingly abortions are performed by unqualified people for profit.

In the meantime, Catholic schools in Northern Ireland are barring student Amnesty International groups — because Amnesty supports abortion as a right for rape survivors and for women who find their health or life threatened by pregnancy.

Two leading Belfast grammar schools which had highly active Amnesty youth groups have shut them down in protest at the stance of the human rights organisation. It is the latest sign that the Catholic church and Amnesty, while agreeing on a wide range of human rights problems, are at odds on the contentious abortion issue. Amnesty now backs terminations in some circumstances, replacing its previous policy of neutrality.

The group will campaign for women to have access to abortion in cases such as rape or incest, or where pregnancy puts a mother’s life or her health at grave risk. It said its position had been informed by its work in areas such as Darfur, “where rape is used systematically as a weapon of war”.

Abortion is very much a rarity in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, but thousands of women and girls travel to Britain each year for terminations. The Catholic church opposes abortion for any reason.

Amnesty had clubs in about 20 Northern Ireland schools but the staunchly Catholic Rathmore Grammar and Our Lady and St Patrick’s College have both severed their links with the group. The Irish Catholic church has also said it finds Amnesty’s policy unacceptable and several clerics have left the group in protest.

The auxiliary Bishop of Down and Connor, Donal McKeown, said: “All we are saying here is that it seemed inappropriate in those circumstances for Catholic schools to be promoting the organisation.”

Thank a pro-lifer today.