GLOBE EDITORIAL
Unsafe abortions' toll
4/6/2004
ABORTION IS legal in at least some circumstances in every country in the world but two: Chile and El Salvador. And yet 70,000 women die of unsafe abortions every year, according to the World Health Organization. Not surprisingly, more than 90 percent of these deaths occur in developing countries, and the victims are overwhelmingly young and poor. "A rich woman in any country can find her way to a safe abortion," says Barbara Crane, executive vice president of Ipas, a global women's health organization. "This is really a social justice issue for women."
Ipas, which trains staff and equips reproductive clinics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is the only US-based foreign aid group that has refused to agree to the odious global gag rule that the Bush administration requires of all organizations receiving US family-planning assistance. Under the rule, organizations must pledge not to provide, support, or even discuss abortion as an option for unplanned pregnancies, even in countries where the procedure is legal. Such a policy would never be tolerated in the United States.
As a result of the gag rule, fewer health workers are being trained in abortion procedures, and poor women -- including rape victims and very young teenage girls -- are increasingly driven to try unsafe, nonclinical methods. These can include drinking poisonous brews or inserting dangerous items into the womb. The gag rule is so strict that groups working in 29 countries have lost funding, not just for abortion counseling but for the many services provided in the clinics, from immunizations to AIDS testing to prenatal care. Where is the logic, never mind the justice, in that?
The maddening truth about the thousands of women killed or mutilated through unsafe abortion -- and the thousands more who die in childbirth -- is that the deaths are mostly preventable. But US policies, driven by ideologues who are blind to the complex needs of these societies, are instead adding to the number of needless deaths.
Threats to reproductive rights are more pronounced in the developing world, but access to safe abortion is being chipped away in the United States as well. Legal and cultural assaults have driven out doctors, so that 87 percent of the counties in the United States, especially in poor, rural areas, now have no abortion providers at all. The ban on so-called partial-birth abortion procedures and the new law establishing separate criminal penalties for harming a fetus at any point after conception continue to erode a constitutionally protected right.
At least the United States banished the coat-hanger abortions being resorted to by the poor, young, marginalized women of the world's most desperate countries. Or did we?
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
