UK: DFID publishes policy position on safe and unsafe abortion

Safe abortion is a right and a necessity, says the Department for International Development. 

The policy position, published in October 2009, is summarised as follows:

DFID supports safe abortion on two grounds. First, it is a right. Women have the right to reproductive health choices. Second, it is necessary. 20% of pregnancies globally end in induced abortion; unsafe abortion accounts for 13% of all maternal deaths and the hospitalisation of a further five million women every year due to serious health complications. This preventable mortality and ill-health due to unsafe abortion is seriously undermining countries’ ability to achieve MDG 5 (to improve maternal health) and places a high burden on already over-stretched health systems. But DFID does not support abortion as a method of family planning. In countries where it is legal, DFID will support programmes that make safe abortion more accessible. In countries where it is illegal and mortality and morbidity is high, DFID will make the consequences of unsafe abortion more widely understood, and will consider supporting processes of legal and policy reform.

The full document is available here.

Commentary: Writing in the Belfast Telegraph on 22 October 2009, Eamonn McCann asks, ‘Why have we one rule for abortion in Lusaka and another in Lisburn?’

‘The Government of which [International Development Minister] Mike Foster is a member refuses to consider intervention to assert the same right and meet the same necessity in a region which remains constitutionally part of the UK, while advocating safer and more accessible abortions in Africa, Latin America, south Asia and other far-flung places where the UK has no jurisdiction,’ argues McCann.

Read the full article here.