| A Global Setback for Abortion Rights Starts in the US Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, on Wednesday called the end of legal abortion in the US a "setback" for a 40-year global trend toward increased abortion access around the world. The US Supreme Court ruling has, in fact, made the country an outlier. Abortion is legal in every other G7 country, as it is in China and India; even conservative Catholic countries like Argentina and Colombia have liberalized their laws, as have Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo. "With this decision, the US joins a handful of autocratic, anti-democratic countries bent on denying human rights and restricting access to abortion," Ipas, an NGO working to increase abortion and contraceptive access globally, said in a statement. In spite of the progress many countries have made, the ruling also emphasized how precarious reproductive rights can be. South Korea, for example, legalized abortion more than a year ago but has yet to regulate the procedure, leaving access largely up to doctors' discretion. Mexico also decriminalized abortion last year, but it will take state-level action to make clinics and care readily available. Elsewhere the right to abortion is qualified and conditional. Japan, for example, is on the cusp of approving the pills used for inducing an abortion, but may require women get spousal consent to take them — already a requirement for getting an abortion procedure there. Israel this week loosened restrictions, but still requires women to make their case to a committee to get an abortion. In other words, the right to choose still comes with a fairly large asterisk in many places, and some worry the US decision could trigger an anti-abortion wave around the world. "This is going to fuel the conservative elements in any other country that chooses to be inspired by it," said Margaret Thomas, a board member and past president of Aware, which advocates for gender equality in Singapore. To that end, Ghebreyesus had this to say: "It is more important than ever to come together to protect women's right to safe abortion —everywhere." —Rebecca Greenfield | 
No comments:
Post a Comment