Abortion laws world-wide. Red countries on the map: Abortion illegal in all circumstances or permitted only to save a woman’s life. Pink countries on the map: Abortion legally permitted only to save a woman’s life or protect her physical health. via.
Compare with:
via (caution: disturbing images of dead children).
Notice anything?
Unsafe abortion is the leading cause of gynecological emergencies in Kenya, where the procedure is illegal. Several studies all yielded the same conclusion: Hospitals are overwhelmed with women injured (and sometimes killed) by illegal abortion. In one study, 43 percent of all women admitted for gynecological disorders were women who had unsafe abortions; in another, unsafe abortions accounted for 60 percent of gynecological emergencies; in another, 87 percent. More than half of the unsafe abortions in the second study were procured by girls under the age of 14.
Our current international policy promotes abstinence until marriage for women in developing nations (including Kenya). We cut off funding to any organization that so much as mentions abortion — including advocating for abortion rights to save the health and lives of these women. This policy — the Global Gag Rule — puts women and children’s lives in danger in an effort to appease our current president’s “pro-life” base. They’ll tell you that the Gag Rule is in place because U.S. tax dollars should not be funding abortions abroad. What they won’t tell you — because they’re lying through their teeth — is that U.S. dollars have been barred from funding abortions since the 1970s; U.S. dollars did not fund abortions abroad during the Clinton era, when the Gag Rule was rescinded; and U.S. dollars will never fund abortion abroad, even if the Gag Rule is lifted — unless the 1973 Helms Amendment is repealed, and that won’t be happening any time soon. So this isn’t about paying for abortions. It’s about allowing health care organizations to agitate for abortion rights. It’s about allowing health care workers to mention abortion as an option in countries where the procedure is legal. It’s about allowing clinics to fund legal abortions with their own non-U.S. money.
But ideology is more important than reality, and as we cut off health care funds and chant “just get married!,” the bodies pile up (keep in mind that the same clinics which provide reproductive health services are often the same clinics that provide safer sex information, sexual health education, HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention information, pre-natal care, and well-baby care).
Dozens of organizations and health care clinics have lost funding because of the Gag Rule. Restoring funding to the United Nations Population Fund, just one of the organizations whose budgets were cut, could prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies and 800,000 abortions this year. Getting contraception to women who want it could prevent 22 million abortions, 23 million unplanned births, and 1.4 million infant deaths.
I covered this more in-depth a couple of years ago, and I’ll re-emphasize something I wrote then:
Bush’s policies have also exacerbated the global AIDS crisis, as many of the family planning clinics that were shut down or de-funded by the gag rule also served as HIV/AIDS education and treatment centers. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, provides more condoms to developing nations than any other organization, but its shipments have been scaled back or cut off completely to 29 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East because of the gag rule.
Funding for condoms is so low that if all the condoms in Africa were evenly distributed to the men on that continent, each man would be allotted three per year.
In places like Kenya, nearly half of maternal mortalities are the result of unsafe abortions. The average Kenyan woman has five births, and lives until the age of 50. The majority of Kenyan women lack access to contraception. And while terms like “unsafe abortion” don’t sound particularly pleasant, let’s keep in mind what the reality of “unsafe abortion” actually is for many women. From a pre-election column I wrote in 2004:*
When you go to cast your vote Nov. 2, remember women like Hillary Fyfe, whose abstinence-based HIV prevention group Family Life Movement in Zambia lost $30,000 in U.S. funding due to Bush’s policies.
Fyfe has seen the results of the gag rule firsthand, as women induce abortions by “swallowing pounded glass, pushing sharp needles or other unsafe instruments through their uterus, pushing poisonous substances up their vaginas like cuttings from trees or roots, drinking bleach mixed with glass, or overdosing on malaria pills.
“All of the above end up with the death of both mother and child,” Fyfe writes. “Or the child dies and the mother is crippled for life. These cases are a daily occurrence.”
In countries where abortion is legal — like the United States — it’s one of the safest surgical procedures around. It’s safer than getting a penicillin shot. But because we love “life” so much, we’ll make it harder for women in poorer nations to have the same right to medical care and bodily integrity. And while we’re talking about how much we love babies, we’ll look the other way when desperate women are drinking bleach mixed with glass to terminate a pregnancy. We’ll look the other way when actual babies — you know, born ones — are dying. We’ll look the other way when children are orphaned because our international policies kill and maim their mothers. And we’ll still have the audacity to call ourselves “pro-life.”
via Feministing.
*Excuse the quoting-of-thyself. It’s just easier than re-researching every piece of information I’ve already written about.