World Health Organization: Key Messages on Unsafe Abortion
- An estimated 19-20 million unsafe abortions take place every year. 97% of these are in developing countries.
- Despite its frequency, unsafe abortion remains one of the most neglected global public health challenges.
- An estimated 68,000 women die every year from unsafe abortion, and millions more are injured, many permanently.
- Leading causes of death are hemorrhage, infection, and poisoning from substances used to induce abortion.
- Access to modern contraception can reduce but never eliminate the need for abortion.
- Legalisation of abortion is a necessary but insufficient step toward eliminating unsafe abortion.
- When abortion is made legal, safe, and easily accessible, women’s health rapidly improves. By contrast, women’s health deteriorates when access to safe abortion is made more difficult or illegal.
- Legal abortion in developed countries is one of the safest procedures in contemporary practice, with case-fatality rates less than one death per 100,000 procedures.
- Manual vacuum aspiration (a handheld syringe as a suction source) and medical methods of inducing abortion have reduced complications.
- Treating complications of unsafe abortion overwhelms impoverished health-care services and diverts limited resources from other critical health-care programmes.
- The underlying causes of this global pandemic are apathy and disdain for women; they suffer and die because they are not valued.
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*This applies to anyone with a uterus.Just in case anti-choicers missed this the first time around.
I just used this pdf as a source in an essay for my Religion in America class. Be warned, it has a really gross picture of how horribly wrong unsafe abortions can turn out. On the other hand, I think every bullshit pro-lifer who posts pictures of “aborted fetuses” should have to stare at it for a good, long time.
(Source: stfuprolifers, via stfuprolifers)