Get the feed!
Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 a year
Read the article / show / issue that provoked me to write a letter and my response below that or go straight to my response
Date Posted on this Site
October 19, 2009
Publication
Toronto Star
Publication Date
October 14, 2009
Published Content
By David Crary
Increased contraceptive use has led to fewer abortions worldwide, but deaths from unsafe abortion remain a severe problem, killing 70,000 women a year, a research institute reported Tuesday in a major global survey.
More than half the deaths, about 38,000, are in sub-Saharan Africa, which was singled out as the region with by far the lowest rates of contraceptive use and the highest rates of unintended pregnancies.
The report, three years in the making, was compiled by the New York-based Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights and is a leading source of data on abortion-related trends. Researchers examined data from countries and multinational organizations.
The institute's president, Sharon Camp, said she was heartened by the overall trends since Guttmacher conducted a similar survey in 1999, yet expressed concern about the gap revealed in the new report.
"In almost all developed countries, abortion is safe and legal," she said. "But in much of the developing world, abortion remains highly restricted, and unsafe abortion is common and continues to damage women's health and threaten their survival."
The report calls for further easing of developing nations' abortion laws, a move criticized by Deirdre McQuade, with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.
"We need to be much more creative in assisting women with supportive services so they don't need to resort to the unnatural act of abortion," she said.
Guttmacher estimated previously that the number of abortions worldwide fell from 45.5 million in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003 - the latest year for which global figures were available.
A key reason for that drop, the new report said, was that the portion of married women using contraception increased from 54 per cent in 1990 to 63 per cent in 2003 as availability increased and social mores changed. Guttmacher's Guttmacher's researchers said contraceptive use had increased in every major region, but still lagged badly in Africa - used by only 28 per cent of married women there, compared with at least 68 per cent in other major regions.
The report notes that abortions worldwide are declining even as more countries liberalize their laws. Since 1997, it said, only Poland, Nicaragua and El Salvador substantially increased restrictions on abortion, while laws were eased significantly in 19 areas, including Cambodia, Nepal and Mexico City.
Despite this trend, the report said 40 per cent of the world's women live in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws, virtually all of them in the developing world. This category includes 92 per cent of the women in Africa and 97 per cent in Latin America, it said.
The report estimated 19.7 million of the 41.6 million abortions in 2003 were unsafe - either self-induced, performed by unskilled practitioners or carried out in unhygienic surroundings.
My Response Letter
Your readers should know that 70,000 women DO NOT die each year from unsafe abortions. That figure is an exaggerated estimation -- a falsification -- publicized by the Guttmacher Institute. The Institute admits as much in the first few pages of its report (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/AWWfullreport.pdf):
"it is difficult to obtain detailed, reliable information about the practice of unsafe abortion in the world’s poorest countries and to create accurate measures of its extent and harmful consequences."
"As a result of these difficulties, researchers have had to develop new, indirect methods for estimating the incidence of abortion and to be innovative in finding ways to maximize the quality of data through a variety of survey and questionnaire designs."
Rather than provide solid factual information, the Institute scaremongers and theorizes that unsafe abortions, and deaths resulting from unsafe abortions, occur frequently in countries with restrictive abortion laws. Hardly sound science.
Was my response published?
No