Report: Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 annually
October 14, 2009 By DAVID CRARY , AP National Writer
A doctor examines a pregnant woman at a government run hospital in Katmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009. The number of abortions worldwide has fallen significantly in tandem with increased use of contraceptives, but unsafe abortion remains a persistent problem killing 70,000 women a year, a research institute reported Tuesday in a major global survey. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
(AP) -- 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 individual 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, a policy director 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 percent in 1990 to 63 percent in 2003 as availability increased and social mores changed. Guttmacher's researchers said contraceptive use had increased in every major region, but still lagged badly in Africa - used by only 28 percent of married women there, compared with at least 68 percent in other major regions.
The report notes that abortions worldwide are declining even as more countries liberalize their abortion laws. Since 1997, it said, only three countries - Poland, Nicaragua and El Salvador - substantially increased restrictions on abortion, while laws were eased significantly in 19 countries and regions, including Cambodia, Nepal and Mexico City.
Despite this trend, the report said 40 percent 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 percent of the women in Africa and 97 percent in Latin America, it said.
The survey concluded that abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in countries where it is legal and where it is highly restricted. The key difference, according to the report, is the high rate of deaths and medical complications from unsafe clandestine abortions in the restrictive countries.
"Legal restrictions do not stop abortion from happening. They just make the procedure dangerous," Camp said. "Too many women are maimed or killed each year because they lack legal abortion access."
In one example, the report told of a Nigerian woman named Victoria who first tried to induce an abortion by drinking an herbal concoction, then consulted a traditional healer who inserted leaves in her vagina that caused internal injuries.
The report estimated that 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.
"Almost all of them occurred in less developed countries with restrictive abortion laws," said the report, which estimated that - beyond the tens of thousands of women killed annually from unsafe abortions - another 8 million women suffer complications because of them.
The report makes three major recommendations:
-Expand access to modern contraceptives and improve family planning services.
-Expand access to legal abortion and ensure that safe, legal abortion services are available to women in need.
-Improve the coverage and quality of post-abortion care, which would reduce maternal death and complications from unsafe abortion.
Camp, in an interview, said sub-Saharan Africa is the area of greatest concern to Guttmacher and like-minded groups. The status of women remains low in many of those countries, she said, while political and religious conservatives block efforts to liberalize abortion laws.
Although the Vatican remains officially opposed to use of contraceptives, Camp said her institute had detected a shift in approach.
"The Catholic Church has informally at least stopped fighting against contraception to the degree it once did and put more of its energies into fighting abortion," she said. "On the ground there are priests and nuns who refer people to family planning services."
McQuade, of the Catholic Bishops Conference, said any priest or nun making such referrals was veering from church policy. She contended that use of artificial contraception could increase a women's health risks and said they would fare better using natural family planning methods approved by the church.
Overall, the report is "a good news/bad news story," said Susan Cohen, the Guttmacher Institute's director of government affairs, who hailed the decline in abortions and unintended pregnancies.
"The bad news is that where most of the poor women live, throughout the developing world, unsafe abortion remains high, and women are dying as a result of it," she said. "It's so preventable, and that's the tragedy."
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Oct 13, 2007 |
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http://www.johnst...dex.html
More than 1 Billion Going Hungry, UN Says
(CNN) -- The global economic crisis has caused a spike in world hunger that has left more than a billion undernourished, United Nations agencies said in a new report.
-Whats your point Freethinking? You sound like you think something can be done about this. Or just musing?
My solution however would be to eliminate corruption (the #1 cause of hunger), encourage democracy (interesting isnt it that most hungry people live in dictatorships).
BTW killing a billion hungry people today, without eliminating corruption, will result in a billion people taking their place within a very short time.
You need to take a looks at stats, Rwanda and Liberia have less population per square mile, and have a larger growing region than does many eruopean countries. Gaza is supported and if there wasnt corruption there wouldnt even be hunger there.
As for the Weimar republic corruption, then dictatorship...
As for the USA first comes corruption (Republican or Democrat who cares) ACORN, SCIU, Communists, etc... (Power corrupts)... If we dont fight corruption, if we dont hold our leaders accountable (dems or repubs) then comes dictatorship, then comes starvation...
Plato said democracy was only one step above despotism. Without surreptitious management it won't last even among healthy pops. You're right- these things follow one another, but instability will collapse all but the most totalitarian of govts. Your children are starving, what do you do? You blame whatever govt is in power no matter what form it's in. With democracy you form another party- in weimar there were 30-some major parties. Stability only returns when they throw the rabble-rousers in the gulag. Full bellies don't make contientious voters- they make happy parents.
I am off-topic and apologize. Like dangerous wholesale abortion, sham governments are yet one more misery we have to tolerate until civilization can get it's rate of growth under control
BTW, Ive worked in Russia, have had family who lived in a communist country (germany) and who were communists and even spys for the secret police, and I visisted East Germany when the wall was up, I have lived in Germany since then. Know people who do relief work in Africa. So I am not uninformed. I know corruption what it does. I know what it is like to live under communism. I know the fear of saying the wrong thing
Communism and dictatorship brings us down to the level of animals. Democracy, while not perfect, allows people to live without fear of their government.
Im not sure if you really believe what you say, but if you do, I feel sorry for you.
This conversation has summed up nicely why America is failing. People are so terrified of taking responsibility for their own life (a.k.a. living a.k.a. dieing) that they wait for either a self-serving government or a non-existant god to fix everything. Of course nothing happens to improve their lot in either case.
if you visit the johnstons archive you will see that the overwhelming majority of abortions take place in red countries. This is represented as a great freedom.
We're not supposed to discuss religion here although I really like to. Jesus was another sociopolitical scam, a stopgap measure albeit the most brilliant one. How could the god of everything be all good? That's absurd. Nuff said. Feel sorry for everybody but the chosen- we can't pretend these miserable problems will be fixed when the Grand Magician returns to fix them. Here's to abortion- safe, free, and rare.
Unfortunately, solving that problem requires education and release from religious dogma. Good luck with that.
A fetus or embryo is not a baby. You are messing up terms. You have an irrational and emotional view about these developing organisms in the belly of fullgrown women. We should not give them the same human rights as the pregnant women. Maybe it sounds humane and the right thing to do at first, but it really isn't and it will contribute to more misery, damage, deaths, and legal problems.
The only person who has the right, responsibility and insight to abort is the mother in which the fetus/embryo is growing.
Unsafe abortions (and irresponsibility of many) are the foremost problems here. We should nót make abortion illegal, since it will lead to more and more deaths.
These women are no fools and can make a better judgment about their pregnancy than you can. Inform people about responsibility of dangers, sex and contraception and keep abortion from turning into a taboo and most problems will vanish.
I think you have misunderstood my words. In my post I clearly state that irresponsibility and scarce information is a problem which leads to (un)safe abortions. I would not dare to say that every woman thinks about their pregnancy the way you are saying. But hey, maybe that's overpositive or even naive of me. They are out there yes, and that is a whole other problem (we unfortunately can't fix).
This is about unsafe abortions. Unsafe because there is a big taboo on the subject, it's forbidden in most countries and therefore will be more frequent, illegal and harmful.
Freethinker is just one of those guys who is screaming like a madman, because he has some irrational stance about the subject (based on the bible?) and doesn't come up with a well thought out solution and only makes the problem worse by demoting abortion to the illegal and dangerous realm.
I'm very concerned about this.
Most women(/men) really think this through and are smart and responsible enough to decide.
I am all for abortions too but I am not deluded as to what they are for. The sheer magnitude of the campaign and the fact that it continues despite it's inherent danger (many problems with RU486 and procedures in backward states over decades) tell me it's about population control, not the relative freedom of the minority of women who make 'informed choices'.
Go to the johnstons archive website. See where and to what % of total conceived are aborted, and then ask yourself where they and their descendents would be living, eating, etc. Of course it's not that simple. Certainly not as simple as you made it out to be.
also the book More which I reference above. Abortion IS that dangerous and has been much more. Out of 1 BILLION procedures maybe I million deaths not to mention mutilations, sterilizations? I'll look-
http://www.amazon...74024230
-This author also parrots the Party line but his facts as well as johnstons tell a different story.
In the end it doesn't matter what abortions are for. Even when the problem is intricate and not as simple as stated, it doesn't mean the action it takes to improve the situation must be as complex as the reasons it came to be. We don't have a right, as a society, to ban abortion because some women have other sexual ethics than 'we' do. Me, personally, would never want to abort a pregnancy. But it isn't up to me to choose for others, as it is not up to you. This is about choice, right, responsibility of the mothers (which are the only ones who can and should make the decisions about the developing fetus/embryo in their uterus). Their (missing) emotional connection is more real and important than the irrational vision of hypothetical human beings by the 'pro-life' (pro-quantity and anti-woman) community.
That's the biggest difference between me and someone like freethinker. He is shouting away to ban this, ban that, based on his personal belief what life is, while he is forgetting the interests of many real human beings.
Wow, changing my sentences, using wrong terms, inserting insignificant terms, approaching godwin's law and false accusations.
Nice use of fallacies freethinking...
I consider jews, blacks, whites, conservatives, liberals, old, young, babies born and unborn fully human.
It is interesting that Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood was a racist and a believer of eugenics. Her views and the nazi's view of race and eugenics were very similar. Its extremely difficult to say all humans are valuable and be a racist or a supporter of eugenics. But for those who believe in abortion how hard is it to say blacks, or jews are not fully human? If you consider one group of people subhuman, whats to prevent you from believing another group is subhuman?
And by the way... Rating all my posts as a 1 is rather childish, don't you think?
@otto
Dear sir, I don't know what's gotten into you, but I am not indoctrinated. I am not at all interested in your conspiracytheories, especially when the knowledge of them don't contribute to solving and understanding this problem.
Reading my posts is one thing, but understanding the context is another.
I wish you well.
Abortion is so vital to the future of the planet that the dangers of have been well known for decades and yet those facts were routinely suppressed as the Rockefeller foundation and other parties sold it around the globe under the guise of family planning. Govts everywhere legalized it. Communist countries bore the majority of it, those regions which saw the moist ruin and bloodshed in the first half of the 20th cent. Medieval Christian and Jewish cultures destroyed so that abortion and birth control could take place- the most significant result of those wars, I submit.