Monday, August 06, 2007 Editorials: Aborting accidents
IN A STREET somewhere in the city, these houses stand out in the line of hovels and grimy washing.
The paint looks new; the concrete facades, irreproachable. The roofed verandas at the top command a panoramic view that crops out the blight of its locale.
The neighborhood, of course, knows who dwells in these urban palaces. “Two of them are abortionists; the others sell drugs,” says someone from a group of women sitting by the curb.
A part-time volunteer for a local people’s organization confirms this information. In the ensuing buzz, there is greater interest in the peddlers of illegal drugs and their earnings.
When a question is posed about the abortionists, someone observes that visitors arrive in taxis, some paying the drivers to keep their meters running.
Do local people, too, go there to have their “accidents” solved? There is laughter at this ignorance. Somebody comments that only those who can afford taxis can afford these places. The poor just have accidents, someone adds. They slip by accident and then the other “accident” gets also solved, says another of the mirthless women.
Alarming rise
It is by no means an accident that “unintended” and “unplanned” pregnancies exist in this permissive age.
Such types of pregnancy often result in another modern “accident”: complications arising from failed abortions.
Central Visayas posted an increase in the number of abortions, from 11 for every 1,000 women six years ago to the current 17 in a thousand.
This is based on the Allan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) survey conducted last year and released last July 30 by the nongovernment organization Likhaan.
According to Jujemay G. Awit’ s July 31, 2007 report featured in Sun.Star Cebu, the AGI survey covered women of reproductive age, between 15 and 49 years, in the country. The data showed that Visayas and Metro Manila showed sharp increases in abortion cases.
Rash of complications
Complications arising from abortion sent 9,000 women in Visayas to hospitals, pointed out the AGI survey. Eight hundred of the 79,000 women seeking treatment for abortion complications across the country died in 2000.
Increasing the risks is the fact that only 29 percent of abortions are done by medical doctors or registered nurses. The rest are self-induced, with the help of “unsafe providers,” like acquaintances, medications, folk concoctions, or traditional hilots (quack healers).
The illegality of induced abortion prevents many women from seeking immediate medical help. Cases have also been documented of some medical personnel refusing aid or prolonging the suffering of these women for committing an act perceived as immoral.
A licensed doctor and city health official was recently arrested in an entrapment operation. She declared on national TV that she performed abortions to save the life of those who went through botched abortions and had nowhere to go.
Right wrongs
House Hill (HB) 3773 outlaws medical and other social acts of discrimination against women suffering from abortion complications.
But HB 3773, or the Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act, was snubbed during the 13th Congress. Filed in 2005, the bill is opposed by the Catholic Church and its groups for allegedly promoting abortion and family planning.
Likhaan and other pro-choice advocates argue that giving poor women, who comprise 68 percent of those inducing abortion, the information and the means to choose the size of their families, spacing of their pregnancies, and their family’s overall quality of life is actually anti-abortion and pro-family.
While law enforcers trap and arrest quacks performing abortions, access to reproductive health information can free women from the need to seek abortion in the first place.
