World Safe Abortion Day is Wednesday, September 28. For the co-president of Family Planning, “the path to abortion” rest “another obstacle course” in France. Throughout the world, this access to voluntary termination of pregnancy is very unequal. Direction Madagascar, Poland and India.
In Madagascar, abortion continues to be considered a crime
On the planet, about twenty countries still strictly prohibit voluntary termination of pregnancy, even in the most extreme cases of rape, incest or endangering the life of the mother. This is the case in Madagascar , a legacy of the Napoleonic code of 1810. In Antananarivo, a deputy and associations have been fighting since 2017 to decriminalize even the therapeutic termination of pregnancy. But five years later and after four setbacks in the National Assembly, the situation has not changed: the Christian Churches, very powerful within society and above all very influential with political decision-makers, seem to prevent any discussion about a relaxation of the law.
For advocates of therapeutic abortion, this situation is totally hypocritical. Hypocritical, because in reality clandestine abortion is widely practiced. In the best of cases, in clinics, hospitals and on a daily basis elsewhere, told franceinfo the doctors I met. While the poorest women have recourse to the services of angel makers, with all the risks that entails.
On the island, anyone who practices this medical gesture incurs a prison sentence. Women who also have abortions, for whatever reason, fall under the law. This is the case of Tsila, who had to terminate her very first pregnancy at four and a half months. “The gynecologist saw that there was a problem with the fetusshe explains. It was a polymalformation. That meant the baby wouldn’t have survived long after birth. And also, that if we persisted in wanting to keep it, I could die. Today, because of having had recourse to the ITG, I risk prison, ten years of imprisonment…” In practice, these penalties are rarely applied. Nevertheless, they create a climate of fear and push women to take risks in order to have an abortion. It is estimated that three women die every day on the island as a result of “spontaneous or induced abortion”.
In India, often poor abortion conditions
India is the best student in the field – the country of 1.3 billion inhabitants, which in a few years will have the largest population in the world, has authorized abortion for more than 50 years. The tendency is to facilitate this termination of pregnancy: Indian women can abort during the first 12 weeks, even at 20 weeks in special cases, after consulting two doctors. In 2021, a new law also extended this period by four additional weeks, to bring it to almost six months of pregnancy, for exceptional cases of rape or congenital malformation.
But the conditions of these abortions are often bad. According to the United Nations Population Fund, two-thirds of abortions in India are unhealthy and therefore unsafe, which is 50% higher than the global average. These abortions are poorly supervised, carried out in small hospitals without hygiene, or practiced clandestinely to hide them from the family. Eight Indian women thus die every day as a result of these abortions, which represents the 3rd cause of maternal mortality in the country. In addition to the lack of hygiene, these deaths are explained by the glaring lack of sex education, by the taboo and therefore the silence around these questions of reproduction – this lack of information pushes young women to have sexual relations unprotected, and therefore unwanted pregnancies. They therefore do not know how to manage these very complicated situations with care and in a supervised manner.
In Poland, abortion has almost become illegal
The right to abortion is regularly attacked by the national-conservative party in power in Poland. It exists, but it is reduced to the bare minimum. We can even say that it is almost forbidden in the country. Two years ago, the Constitutional Court, under government control, limited the cases in which women could resort to abortion. It is no longer possible to abort in the event of malformation of the fetus. Except that these abortions represented 98% of the 1,100 abortions performed legally in 2019. Abortion has therefore, in fact, almost become illegal. Today, Polish women can only terminate their pregnancy in the event of rape or incest or if there is a danger to the life or health of the pregnant woman.
This condition is not always respected in Poland. Some are even victims. Izabela was 30 years old, Agniezka 37 years old, they died because of complications in their pregnancy and the doctors didn’t want to do anything. If they performed an abortion and the court decided there was no danger to the mother, then the doctors faced up to three years in prison. In the case of Izabela’s death, three of the doctors caring for her were charged with manslaughter earlier this month for allegedly failing to help a woman in danger. They claim that they simply obeyed the law.
The Poles may demonstrate, but that doesn’t change anything. When reproductive rights were curtailed in 2020, 400,000 people took to the streets for months. They were the largest protests since Soviet times. But that was not enough to change the government’s decisions.