Saturday, November 06, 2004

Abortion in the News



In Kenya, a physician is facing murder charges for performing abortions:

John Nyamu, a Kenyan obstetrician and gynecologist, will stand trial next week after being charged with performing 15 abortions. Dr. Steven Ochiel, the head of Kenya's Medical Association, is urging doctors to protest the murder trial, stating that "the case against Dr. Nyamu is not against him. It is against the medical profession," reports The East African Standard.


In Portugal, abortion is mostly illegal, and as a consequence:

Health statistics reveal that over 1,000 Portuguese women were hospitalized last year as a result of complications from back-alley abortions. According to Agence France-Presse, between 20,000 to 40,000 clandestine abortions are performed annually in Portugal.


In the U.S., abortion might also become mostly or totally illegal:

Anti-abortion advocates responding to the results of the presidential election announced that with President Bush's win and the Republican Party's increased control of the US Congress, they have hopes that the administration will successfully pursue an anti-choice agenda. Citing a net gain of three anti-choice senators, the National Right to Life Committee is planning to pursue legislation that would make it a crime to travel with a minor across state lines to obtain an abortion in order to circumvent restrictive parental notification laws that inhibit a woman's right to choose, according to Reuters. Anti-abortion advocates are also aiming to ban human cloning, even for stem cell research purposes, as well as secure right-wing, anti-abortion nominations to federal courts.


Banning abortions will not stop them. It will drive them underground and increase the number of women dying each year, though the rich will get their abortions safely in any case. What would severely reduce abortions is proper sex education, including information on both abstinence and the proper use of contraception.
Just look at abortion statistics in those countries which do have proper sex education.

Also, anti-abortion men and women could just say no to sex...But I doubt that this recommendation will work. I also wonder how much the anti-abortion movement is really founded on desires other than the belief that life begins at conception (rather than at some other point either before or after conception). There are some very primal reasons why many view women largely as a source for more population growth, and as population growth is very important for groups like the White Supremacists, to have this important political variable determined by individual women's decisions is not a good thing for them.