Xinhua | 70,000 Nepali women go for unsafe abortion:
Though the Nepali government has set up facilities for safe abortion, there are still scores of women, who go for unsafe and illegal facilities in Nepal, an official at Koshi Zonal Hospital said here Sunday."The government and independent data show that 70,000 women undergo abortion every year in Nepal," Ganesh Gurung, medical superintendent at the hospital, told reporters.
Those wishing to terminate pregnancy include women from all hierarchies of the society, from the poverty stricken illiterate ones to the educated, Gurung noted, adding, those seek the help of quacks because of social stigma.
The women's need to undergo unsafe abortion is mostly induced by the desire to keep their pregnancy a secret or conceived through illicit relationship.
Hmmmmm ... according to the Beeb, Nepal legalized abortion almost three years ago. And Nepalese women are still resorting to unsafe abortion methods? That's crazy!
BBC News | South Asia | Nepal women win abortion rights:
Before this, any abortion was illegal in Nepal - women's activists had been campaigning for years for the ban to be lifted.According to doctors, Nepal's abortion ban forced untold thousands of women to seek dangerous back-street abortions.
No accurate estimates exist of the number of women who died or were maimed after unsterile operations.
Hey, look! Nepal bought the same line of hooey that we did! "Untold thousands" of women supposedly went to back-alley abortionists, yet even the BBC is forced to admit that "no accurate estimates exist" of the actual damage. Does anyone else see the irony in those two statements?
At one point, in the late 1990s, nearly 100 women were in jail in Nepal, accused of seeking or having illegal abortions.Some were behind bars with their children; others, according to their lawyers, had merely had miscarriages but were accused of aborting their babies by relatives or neighbours.
False accusations are despicable, especially when combined with the grief that a miscarriage often causes. Still, let's go back to the Xinhua story for another statistic:
"The latest census of Nepal shows that maternal mortality in every 100,000 is 415, out of which 203 die due to complications arising in abortion," Gurung revealed.
Suddenly, those "nearly 100 women" in jail don't seem so tragic. At least they were still alive.
(cross-posted to Naaman the Ex-Leper)
