Article up at AlterNet today about views on abortion world-wide. A taste:
When you live in a country where abortion rights remain a contentious issue in every election and anti-choice activists are emboldened enough to demonstrate against the birth control pill, there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the future of reproductive freedom. But internationally, there’s a glimmer of good news: Around the globe, individual citizens support abortion rights, even when their own governments criminalize abortion.
The Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed men and women in 18 countries that collectively make up 59 percent of the world’s population. In 17 out of the 18 countries, a majority of respondents rejected criminal penalties for abortion. In nine of the 18 countries, majorities said that abortion is an individual decision that governments should butt out of. Of those nine countries which thought the government should intervene in abortion rights, only a majority in one — Indonesia — supported criminal sanctions for women who terminate their pregnancies.
Have pro-choice values been embraced ’round the world? No. But the effects that anti-choice policies have on public health and family life around the world are difficult to deny. It’s also clear that the legal status of abortion has no correlation with the abortion rate in any given country — that is, outlawing abortion doesn’t mean that it’s less common. In fact, some of the countries with the highest abortion rates in the world are places where the procedure is totally outlawed. By contrast, the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the world have a few things in common: Safe, legal and accessible (often free, covered by national health care systems) abortion and contraception, plus comprehensive sexual health education and a culture that treats sex as both a pleasure and a responsibility, not a shameful act. Other things that correlate: The fact that lack of access to contraception jacks up the abortion rate, and the fact that illegal abortion often means unsafe abortion, which leads to significantly higher rates of maternal injury or death.
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and here, I thought USA was the land of freedom and choices. Oops. I was wrong!!!
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