New book highlights access to safe abortion as a prerequisite for safe motherhood

A new book from the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) stresses that ensuring women’s access to safe abortion is essential to achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goal of improving maternal health. Moreover, the book asserts, access to safe abortion is a human right.

RFSU launched the book, titled “Respect Choice,” at a press conference Oct. 7 in Stockholm attended by representatives of United Nations and government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and others. Ipas Senior Policy Advisor Leila Hessini, who contributed an article on progress implementing abortion-related commitments from the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), participated in the event.

“Every minute of every day, 40 women undergo an unsafe abortion. Nearly 70,000 die and millions more are injured,” Hessini said. “Those deaths and injuries are entirely preventable, but far too little is done to prevent them. By telling women’s stories and promoting understanding of the realities of women’s lives, this book will help make a difference.”

More than 20 reproductive health and rights experts and journalists from around the world contributed articles to the RFSU book. The articles – a mix of personal accounts and reflections, and political analyses – address such issues as:

• Efforts by women's groups in Kenya, including the Ipas Africa Alliance for Women's Health and Rights, to encourage liberalization of the abortion law
• The need for better documentation of the impact of unsafe abortion worldwide
• The tremendous toll from unsafe abortion in India, despite a liberal law in effect for more than 30 years
• How the Catholic Church is undermining the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights in the European Union v
• Anti-choice resistance to introduction of medication abortion, which can play an important role in expanding women’s access to safe abortion

The book is the fourth in a series of RFSU publications to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the landmark ICPD conference. At that meeting, the global community pledged to make abortion safe in circumstances in which it is not against the law and to take other steps to address the public-health crisis of unsafe abortion. Hessini’s article, “Ten years on – have the promises been fulfilled?”, reports that a global review by Ipas of reproductive-health indicators uncovered a number of positive developments related to abortion in the last decade. They include greater attention to the social injustice of denying women control over their own reproductive capacity, some instances of legal reform to support women’s right to abortion and important advances in health systems and abortion technology.

Nevertheless, unsafe abortion continues to pose a grave danger to many of the world’s most vulnerable women, and much more needs to be done, Hessini said. Regressive policies such as the U.S. Global Gag Rule need to be revised, for example, and the international community needs to invest more resources in saving women’s lives from unsafe abortion.

“RFSU has done a wonderful job telling the truth about abortion and what it means in women’s lives,” she said. “Ipas is grateful for this important contribution to the field.”

"Respect Choice" is available for free on RFSU's website (in English).

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258