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India's Legal Abortions Kill
80,000 Women Annually, Local Expert Says
December 20, 2007
New Delhi, India (LifeNews.com) -- A medical expert in India says an
estimated 80,000 women die from legal abortions there on an annual basis.
The figures provide further evidence that abortion does not became safer if
legalized, as unlicensed and unregulated abortion practitioners pose as much
of a threat to women's health as illegal abortions.
Dr. Hema Divakar, the chair of the Federation of Obsteric and Gynecological
Societies in India discussed the abortion deaths in an interview.
She told the PTI news service that a majority of the abortions done in India
involve untrained abortion practitioners.
Divakar said the answer to the problem of women dying from abortions is to
promote the morning after pill. She cited figures showing 78 percent of
pregnancies in India are unplanned and said women would not resort to
abortion if they used the pill and didn't become pregnant.
However, previous reports show that abortion numbers in Scotland rose after
an aggressive effort to promote the morning after pill there.
The Scotland government reported 13,081 abortions in 2006, up from 12,603
the previous year -- an increase of nearly 3.8 percent.
Abortion is causing other problems in India as a new report shows the gender
imbalance there is growing worse as a result of infanticides and
sex-selection abortions.
Researchers from relief group ActionAid examined a sample of 6,500
households in the Indian states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal
Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
They found that the male-female ratio grew worse in four of the states
compared with the figures from 2001.
According to a Reuters report, upper class Hindu areas of Punjab's Fatehgarh
Sahib district had the worst rates as the organization found only 300 girls
for every 1,000 boys living there.
"These sex ratios are disastrous," Mary John, a researcher from the Centre
for Women Development Studies in New Delhi, told Reuters.
She said the new numbers reflect a trend of having smaller families. Couples
are choosing to have only one child and deciding to only have a boy. India
follows the beliefs of other Asian nations in favoring boys to carry on work
and family names and because girls must have expensive dowries upon their
marriage.
John said the skewed gender ratios occurred in virtually every community
regardless of socioeconomic status, race or religion.
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