Making Abortion Safe Outside of the Legal System: A Q&A on Self-Managed Abortion

Sociologist Naomi Braine’s new book on the global feminist movement for self-managed abortion took her to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study activists’ work there.

FELICIA KORNBLUH
Jan 30, 2024

From 2017 to 2019, sociologist Naomi Braine, a professor at Brooklyn College, traveled in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study what she terms a global feminist movement for self-managed abortion (SMA). The result is her new book, Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion (Verso, 2023).

The story of self-managed abortion starts from the fact that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, at least half of all abortions around the world in 2017 were medication abortions, in which people used drugs to end their pregnancies. (The ambiguous legal status of abortion in many countries means that the data is incomplete.) This contrasts with the common image of so-called “procedural” abortion, which occurs under professional medical care and mostly or entirely in a clinic or hospital.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/self-managed-abortion-naomi-braine/

USA – Why a ‘war on abortion’ is doomed to fail

Opinion by Mary Ziegler and Aziza Ahmed
Wed March 23, 2022

(CNN) Often, the fate of Roe v. Wade looms over the confirmation hearing of any prospective Supreme Court justice. This time feels different. This week, Ketanji Brown Jackson takes questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee as the Supreme Court continues to deliberate whether it will undermine the fundamental right to abortion when it rules on a Mississippi statute that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A number of red states are already counting on a decision reversing Roe. Lawmakers have introduced and sometimes passed another wave of restrictions, all of them unconstitutional under current law. This trend took on particular momentum beginning in 2018, when the Court first had a conservative majority seemingly poised to reverse Roe, conservative lawmakers have introduced laws that violated abortion rights to give the Court a chance to destroy them.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/23/opinions/the-war-on-abortion-ziegler-ahmed/index.html

Abortion restrictions prompt international activists to provide care in America

Abortion restrictions prompt international activists to provide care in America

By Andrew Keiper | Fox News
Oct 25, 2018

Across the nation, women’s access to reproductive care has been protested, shuttered, legislated and sometimes strictly limited. So much so that an international organization has stepped in to provide abortion consultations and medications to women who face high barriers to care.

AidAccess was recently founded by Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts to provide American women with access to abortion medication. The contentious program operates online, and offers women consultations and mail-delivered abortion medication.

Continued: https://www.foxnews.com/health/abortion-restrictions-prompt-international-activists-to-provide-care-in-america

Health-Care Providers Must Consider What Role We’ll Play in Harm Reduction if Abortion Is Outlawed

Health-Care Providers Must Consider What Role We’ll Play in Harm Reduction if Abortion Is Outlawed

Sep 17, 2018
Dr. Daniel Grossman

Texas has seen some of the nation’s most regressive abortion restrictions in recent years. This series chronicles the fall-out of those laws, and the litigation that has followed.

As the prospect of losing the constitutional protection to abortion becomes more real, I am struck by how disconnected the political rhetoric is from medical reality. The facts are clear: Making abortion illegal does not make it go away. Yes, some patients will be prevented from getting a wanted abortion, but others will still end their pregnancies, either by traveling for safe and legal care or by taking matters into their own hands.

Continued: https://rewire.news/article/2018/09/17/health-care-providers-must-consider-what-role-well-play-in-harm-reduction-if-abortion-is-outlawed/

A Harm Reduction Model for Safe Abortion in Uruguay and Argentina

This newsletter summarises all the papers in this supplement, based on excerpts from the actual text, with permission from Anibal Faúndes. The full papers are available on an open access basis under a Creative Commons licence.

12 September 2016

Reducing Maternal Mortality by Preventing Unsafe Abortion: The Uruguayan Experience

International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 2016;134 (Supplement 1, August)
Anibal Faúndes, Editor

IJGO Table of Contents or http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgo.2016.06.010

EDITORIAL

What can we do as gynecologists/obstetricians to reduce unsafe abortion and its consequences? The Uruguayan response

Anibal Faúndes

As health care professionals, we are often confronted with situations in which we feel powerless to deal with the suffering, illness, and death of individuals whose care is our responsibility, particularly in public health facilities. The most common reaction is to protest against the authorities that have failed to provide the necessary resources or to implement the measures required to rectify situations that penalize almost exclusively those most economically disadvantaged. These health problems and their consequent mortality have remained the same for decades, largely because the individuals suffering from them have neither the power nor the political influence to trigger changes that could improve their situation.

Unsafe abortion—with its dramatic consequences for the poorest and most helpless women in countries with restrictive abortion laws—is one of the clearest and most persistent examples of a severe problem that impels us to protest against the authorities that have failed to resolve it.
A small group of physicians from the Pereira Rossell Hospital in Montevideo, Uruguay, decided that they could no longer wait for an external solution… Those doctors decided to implement an original preventive intervention to resolve the problem… [T]hey had no resources, no adequate physical space, and no designated personnel for the task they were proposing to undertake… [but were] inspired by the wise words of Professor Mahmoud Fathalla when he invited all gynecologists and obstetricians to cease being part of the problem and start being part of the solution [1]—achieved what seemed a miracle, namely to reduce maternal deaths from abortion (the primary cause of maternal death in Uruguay at that time) practically to zero.

[continued at link]
Source: International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion

How Uruguay Made It Easier to Have a Safe Abortion

Signs that read in Spanish "Legal abortion" are seen in front of the Uruguayan Congress during a session in Montevideo, Uruguay, Tuesday Dec. 27, 2011. The Uruguayan Senate would approve a bill to decriminalize abortion, after an initiative vetoed by former President Tabare Vazquez in 2008. (AP Photo / Matilde Campodonico)

After Uruguay implemented a harm reduction approach that dealt with abortion as a public health issue rather than a moral one, maternal deaths from unsafe abortions plummeted. Now countries with strict abortion laws are taking notice.

Written by Christine Chung
Published on August 10, 2016

How do you help homeless alcoholics? Few people would guess that giving them a free glass of wine every few hours is part of the answer. But this is known as the harm reduction approach, a strategy or set of policies that aims to reduce the harms associated with certain behaviors – even if they are illegal – but without necessarily ending or reducing those behaviors.

The idea of treating alcoholics by managing their supply, instead of cutting them off completely, was pioneered in Canada and is now being proposed by health experts in Sydney. Giving indigent chronic alcoholics access to shelter and other services while providing them with alcohol is anticipated not only to lead to improvements in their health (or, at least, a less rapid decline), but also to reduce public costs associated with emergency room visits, police contact, court costs and jail time. It’s the same idea behind initiatives that provide heroin addicts with clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV.

Source: NewsDeeply.com

11.08.2016