Latin America, like Ireland, pretends it doesn't have an abortion problem.
But it sure does.
Despite the region’s tough abortion laws, there has not been a drop in abortion rates.These laws cause not only needless death and suffering, but also the criminalization of miscarriage and obstetric complications.
In fact, they have had the opposite effect.
According to a 2008 study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Guttmacher Institute, Latin America has one of the world’s highest abortion rates, with 31 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, compared to 12 per 1,000 in Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds.
According to WHO, botched abortions are a leading cause of maternal death in all parts of the world, accounting for 12 percent of maternal deaths in Latin America and the Caribbean, based on 2008 figures.
Since abortion was made illegal in El Salvador in 1998, 628 women have been jailed for having abortions, according to local rights group Citizens for the Decriminalisation of Abortion (CFDA).On Twitter, someone sensibly asked 'WTF was the point of dragging Beatriz through all that?'
In 2010, the case of one Salvadoran, known as Manuela, shows how women end up paying with their lives because of the country’s absolute abortion ban.
Manuela, who suffered from advanced Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after suffering severe complications giving birth.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which campaigned on her behalf, doctors treated her as if she had attempted an abortion and immediately called the police. She was shackled to her hospital bed and accused of murder.
Manuela did not receive appropriate medical treatment for lymphoma, the rights group says, and died less than a year after being sent to prison, leaving behind two young children. Her case was put before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2012.
Answer is simple. So the fetus fetishists can maintain their fantasy that abortion is never medically necessary.
Claudia Handal, a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion group Red Familia, said the rights of all had been respected.See? It's all good.
"We're very happy because as we said from the beginning, it wasn't necessary to perform an abortion, the point was to respect the baby's life and to give Beatriz the care and the right to health that she deserved," Handal told Reuters.
UPDATE: Actually, a correction. Beatriz did not have a c-section, she had a very high-risk procedure called a hysterotomy. The bullshit gets piled higher and deeper to perpetrate the denial that abortion is frequently a life-saving measure.
7 comments:
16 years ago today, I terminated my pregnancy at 21 weeks because the foetus had no brain.
We found out at 9:30 am on June 3, 1997. By 3am June 4, it was all over.
The pain hasn't dulled over the years, but I don't regret my decision for a second. And it was entirely my decision. Not my husband's, not the doctor's and certainly not the government's.
Shame on those who consider themselves qualified to make decisions for autonomous human beings.
GAB
El Salvador is NOT "All of Latin America." It is one SOVEREIGN COUNTRY within Latin America that honors God, is moral, and rightly treats mother and child as TWO patients but worth saving. The did in this case.
Beatriz's baby died 5 hours AFTER the C-section; no one killed her as they do 1,211,000 times/year in the U.S.
I'm quite aware of El Salvador's status.
And, in fact, I did misrepresent Latin America. Uruguay has come quite a way from its priest-ridden, misogynist past.
Beatriz, a woman with lupus and other serious health problems, was subjected to major surgery weeks after it was known that the fetus was brainless. She was literally tortured and will take months to recover, if she does at all.
For a brainless, non-viable fetus.
An early abortion would have got her back on her feet and back to her family. She already has a child, you know.
But for insane medieval reasons, she was put through this ordeal.
I hope she and her supporters take the government to some human rights body and get some restitution for her suffering.
And don't forget Brazil, where a 9 year old rape victim was expected to give birth to twins, even if it killed her.
The doctors performed an abortion anyways, and the pope excommunicated them.
The rapist however, was not excommunicated, because his crime was less severe!
I often wonder, if in these Catholic countries, a woman aborting a rape fetus is considered to be a worse crime than the rape that created the pregnancy.
No, we haven't forgotten that girl in Brazil.
Here is JJ's deathless take on it.
@fern hill
Balbulican summed it all up rather nicely, and his comment works for Beatriz too:
"Her utter inability to distinguish between the notion of a nine year old girl, raped and pregnant, and a three month old fetus is nothing short of sociopathic. It’s almost irrelevant that her monomania is about foetuses. She’s scary: I begin to understand how these people can kill."
Balbulican is a smart feller.
Those people are scary.
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