MANAGUA, 26 November: Doctors and womens groups are warning that Nicaraguas ban on all abortions – even to save the mother – will endanger the lives of thousands of women every year.
With the new law, which imposes prison sentences of up to eight years for women and doctors, Nicaragua joins El Salvador and Chile as having the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in Latin America and among the toughest in the world.
In El Salvador, women who develop ectopic pregnancies – when a fertilized egg gets stuck in a fallopian tube, giving it no chance of survival – are kept under guard in a hospital. A prosecutor must certify that the embryo has died or the womans tube has ruptured before doctors can intervene.
In Chile, where abortion is punished with three to five years in prison, legislators last week rejected without debate a bill that would have permitted it in limited circumstances.
Nevertheless, rich women go to private clinics where secret abortions are recorded as tumors or miscarriages while poor women obtain back-alley abortions, with an estimated 32.000 suffering serious injuries every year.
Abortion is criminalized throughout majority-Catholic Latin America, except in Cuba. Exceptions are made in most countries to save the mothers life, a procedure known throughout the region as “therapeutic abortion.”
Yet women in the region, who have poor access to contraception, have some of the highest rates of abortion in the world – with an estimated 3,9 million annually, or nearly one per woman over her lifetime.
According to the World Health Organization, South America is the continent with the highest rate of unsafe, clandestine (hemmelige) abortions. As many as 21 percent of maternal deaths in Latin America are associated with abortion, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a US-based research center on reproductive issues.
Colombia was the one Latin American country to liberalize its law earlier this year, allowing abortions in cases of danger to a womans life, rape, or severe fetal (foster) deformity – exceptions that are now being challenged by a group of abortion opponents.
In Nicaragua, Dr. Oscar Flores Mejía, of the countrys National Society of Obstetricians (fødselslæger) and Gynecologists, said the new law has sent fear and confusion through the medical community. He said many doctors understand the ban to mean they can do nothing “to interrupt pregnancy from the moment of conception until birth.”
That rules out operations to save women with ectopic pregnancies, eclampsia, cardiac problems, or other life-threatening complications if doctors could not guarantee that the fetus would survive, Flores said.
– This law is forcing us to be delinquent (forbrydere) in our jobs, he said .
The Rev. Rolando Alvarez, spokesman for the Managua archdiocese, said the Catholic Church fought for a ban without exceptions because church officials estimate that thousands of elective abortions were being performed annually under the guise of saving a woman’s life.
– Before it was penalized, all these murders were treated with impunity (straffrihed), he said.
The ban, which took effect Nov. 18, was passed unanimously by legislators courting church support and religious voters at the height of the electoral season in late October. Among those backing the new law is President-elect Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist.
Activists for womens rights say church leaders who supported the ban and legislators who voted for it will be responsible for thousands of avoidable maternal deaths each year.
According to Health Ministry figures, 1.818 women last year and 902 in the first half of this year had legal abortions to save their lives in public hospitals. Nearly 8.500 others were treated for miscarriages (for tidlig fødsel), natural or induced. Officials say more abortions, for which there are no records, were performed in private clinics .
– What is going to happen to all those women who could be saved by therapeutic abortions? said Magali Quintana of the advocacy group Catholics for Free Choice in Nicaragua, adding: – They will simply be waiting for their deaths.
According to Health Ministry figures compiled by Ipas, a nonprofit agency dedicated to reproductive issues, 50 Nicaraguan women died between 2000 and 2003 from medical conditions aggravated or caused by pregnancy. In many cases, officials never informed the women that abortions were permitted to save their lives, activists say.
Kilde: The Push Journal
