Safe, Legal, Rare

A recent study published in The Lancet states what many pro-choicers have said for years: Making abortion illegal will not decrease the number of women getting them - it only makes the procedure more unsafe. It's just common sense, but of course, there are always detractors. Quoting from an article in the New York Times:

"Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. "These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data," said Randall K. O'Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington.

He said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. "They have equated the word 'safe' with 'legal' and 'unsafe' with 'illegal,' which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal," he said."

That sounds like a plausible counter-argument until you realize that in countries where abortions are illegal, they are not being performed in hospitals and other facilities of the legal health system. Illegal abortion are dangerous, and always will be, precisely because they cannot be performed under the watchful eye of legal medical care.

The study also confirms the common sense fact (long known to most people, but somehow not to religious fanatics) that the best way to prevent abortion is to provide easily accessible contraceptives. After all, it isn't sex that causes abortions - it's unwanted pregnancies. That fact also points a damning finger at the Bush administration's current trend of passing out billions of dollars for abstinence-only programs in HIV-endemic regions of Africa. Condoms as a last resort? You must be genocidal.

Worldwide, the rate of abortion is one in every five pregnancies. That number isn't going to change unless we get comprehensive sex education for all, and access to contraceptives to all.