SUNS4372 Thursday 11 February 1999

United Nations: Battle to liberalise abortion laws undecided

The Hague, Feb 10 (IPS/Farhan Haq) -- Activists attending this week's population forum proudly acknowledge victories made in securing reproductive rights in the five years since 179 governments attended
the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) at Cairo.

Yet one topic during discussions here Feb 8-12 cannot easily be categorised in terms of victory or defeat: abortion laws.
Women's rights advocates present at the Hague Forum, designed to review progress in reproductive rights and population issues since Cairo, reported victories in the effort to make abortion legal and available in some countries - most recently in South Africa - but faced problems in other nations.

U.S. first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton threw down the gauntlet Tuesday in a speech to the Hague Forum in which she stood by Washington's policy of ensuring that abortion be "safe, legal and rare" but insisted on its wider availability worldwide. "We know that wealthy and well-connected women can find access to the services that they need," she said. "What we ask is that all women be able to do so."

Rebecca Cook of the University of Toronto argued that "what truly has been significant since Cairo, is developments in human rights", particularly awareness that many governments are lagging behind on
commitments to provide safe abortions. "Even countries that allow abortions, such as India and Zambia, have been found lacking when it comes to the need to provide "the highest attainable standard of health".

Yet abortion-rights activists summarising the post-Cairo years saw many countries where the problem is not even widespread availability but simple legality. Throughout the developing world - and in many countries of the former pro-Soviet bloc - anti-abortion laws remained firmly entrenched, they argued.

In 1993, anti-choice forces restored laws making abortion illegal in Poland - 37 years after the Communist government ensured its legality, observed Wanda Nowicka of the Polish Federation for Women and Family
Planning. Now, with conservative Catholic parties in Poland's Parliament blocking all attempts to liberalise abortion laws, the restrictions posed "a real threat to women's right to health", Nowicka said.

Similarly, abortion remained illegal in Chile following former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet's decision to reverse the country's previous allowance of legal abortion when the mother's health was threatened.

But Maria Isabel Matamala of the Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network echoed Hillary Clinton's point about the availability of abortion services for the rich and declared there were many abortions
still performed in Chile. "The women who go to prison in these cases are poor women," Matamala said.

Pragya Shah, a women's rights activist in Nepal, argued that Katmandu should lift the penalty of 20 years in prison for women who underwent abortions. Anika Rahman of the U.S.-based Centre for Reproductive Law
and Policy added that all laws criminalising abortion must be lifted as a first step.

Since governments sidestepped the issue of abortion at Cairo, concentrating instead on family planning programmes, the prospects for a debate on abortion laws during this year's review of progress since the ICPD are slim. But many new studies support the activists' contention that restrictive abortion laws do little to prevent abortions from happening.

This month, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based research group, published a report suggesting that "stringent legal restrictions on abortion do not guarantee a low abortion rate".

The study, 'The Incidence of Abortion Worldwide', by Stanley Henshaw, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas, studied abortion in 69 countries, including 10 where the practise is "highly restricted". The study found
that developed and developing nations can have lower abortion rates, depending on the prevalence and use of contraceptives; but that legal restrictions have little clear effect on lowering abortion rates. About 26 million legal and 20 million illegal abortions took place in 1995, the authors note.

Even though the abortion debate was largely sidelined in ll government debates this year on population issues, the spotlight has been cast on the question of decriminalising abortion - and that issue would have to be dealt with eventually by all governments, activists believed.