UK – We still need to have difficult conversations about abortion

Landmark changes to abortion legislation earlier this week will doubtless spark fiery debates at heatwave barbecues. Here, Claire Cohen explains how Gen Z women can take the sting out of discussions about those who opt to terminate their pregnancies after 24 weeks

Saturday 21 June 2025
Claire Cohen

My mother remembers that, when she was a child, a friendly woman, probably in her thirties, lived next door. One day, that woman was gone. Another neighbour had helped her to carry out a “backstreet abortion” – in the days when terminating a pregnancy was illegal, but coathangers were not – and she’d bled to death in her own home.

I don’t even know her name. But I thought of that poor woman this week when MPs voted overwhelmingly to stop women in England and Wales from being prosecuted for ending a pregnancy outside the law – for instance, after 24 weeks. Thank goodness, I thought, we live in a nation where women no longer have to risk death or imprisonment in desperate situations.

Continued: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/abortion-decriminalised-24-weeks-shelagh-fogarty-b2774030.html

‘I’ve seen women suffer’: Malawi’s religious leaders fight for legal abortions

Deaths from backstreet abortions have united pro-choice Christian and Muslim clerics around ending the strict ban

Sarah Johnson
Thu 9 Jan 2025

Throughout his ministry, the Rev Cliff Nyekanyeka has led funeral services for women who died after an illegal abortion in Malawi. He has visited hospitals where doctors have shown him the aftereffects of such procedures, including pictures of what he describes as “rotting uteruses”. And he has seen women struggling with unwanted pregnancies.

It is this lived experience that has led Nyekanyeka to advocate for a woman’s right to choose, and to campaign for change in a country with one of the world’s strictest abortion laws. In Malawi, women seeking an abortion can be imprisoned for up to seven years and anyone administering an abortion to a woman could face 14 years in prison; it is permitted only to save a woman’s life. The law was introduced by the British under colonial rule.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jan/09/women-malawi-religious-leaders-legal-abortion-ban-maternal-mortality-christian-muslim

Eswatini (Swaziland)- Women, girls should not die from unsafe abortion

By Sitakele Maseko
Dec 5, 2024

Unsafe abortion remains one of the leading causes of maternal mortality worldwide, claiming the lives of thousands of women and girls each year.

Despite advances in reproductive health and rights, a significant number of women still face unsafe and illegal abortions, leading to preventable deaths

Continued: http://new.observer.org.sz/details.php?id=23142

04.12.2024

One Billion Rising and Journey of Hope for Girls and Women in Eswatini

Morocco – Fez Police Bust Illegal Abortion Criminal Gang

The court locked up the suspects as the crackdown on crimes related to healthcare and baby-trafficking continue.

Aymen Alami
Dec. 01, 2024

Rabat – Police in Fez have charged eight people, including a nurse and a herbalist, over suspicions of illegal drug sales and aiding abortions.

The arrests took place on Friday, November 29, when officers caught a woman red-handed with 50 abortion pills. Investigations revealed she was supplying them to a nurse working in a local clinic.

A search of another suspect's home uncovered 49 more pills, medical equipment, pregnancy tests, banknotes, and falsified medical papers.

Continued: https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2024/12/366696/fez-police-bust-illegal-abortion-criminal-gang

01.12.2024

Jordan’s Abortion Conundrum

The country’s strict laws leave women with impossible choices and facing financial struggles, stigma and dangerous procedures

Meghan Davidson Ladly
November 29, 2024

Amal watches her children play on the living room floor of her house on a quiet street in a suburb of Jordan’s capital. As dusk settles over the sloping hills of Amman, she sinks into a sofa and lights a cigarette, adjusting her hijab.

“It is illegal, but you can’t know how I feel,” she says. “I couldn’t think of anything except getting rid of this pregnancy. Even my kids — I couldn’t think of them. And I knew I had to make a decision.”

Continued: https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/jordan-abortion-conundrum/

Sally Field Details Her ‘Traumatic’ and ‘Hideous’ Illegal Abortion From 1964 to Urge Voters to Elect Kamala Harris: ‘We Can’t Go Back’

By Zack Sharf
Oct 7, 2024

Sally Field posted a video to Instagram in which she remembered the “hideous” and “traumatic” illegal abortion she underwent in 1964 before her Hollywood acting career took off. The Oscar winner first wrote about the abortion in her 2018 memoir “In Pieces,” but she revived the story ahead of the upcoming presidential election as a call for voters to elect Kamala Harris.

“I’ve been so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story,” Field wrote in the caption to the video. “It was during a time even worse than now. A time when contraception was not readily available and only if you were married. But I feel that so many women of my generation went through similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think of them. I believe, like me, they must want to fight for their grandchildren and all the young women of this country.”

Continued: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/sally-field-abortion-story-kamala-harris-support-1236169893/

07.10.2024

Sally Field's abortion

United States

Health

Human Rights

Nigeria – Police in manhunt for fleeing nurse over failed abortion

25th March 2024
By Uthman Salami

A yet-to-be-identified nurse in Oke-Owa in the Ijebu Ode area of Ogun State is currently on the run after allegedly carrying out an abortion on one Deborah Sokoya.

According to the information made available to PUNCH Metro by a police source, the said abortion failed, leading to serious bleeding and the subsequent hospitalisation of the victim.

Continued: https://punchng.com/police-in-manhunt-for-fleeing-nurse-over-failed-abortion

25.03.2024

Library archives uncover long-lost history of Colorado women dying trying to get an abortion before it was legal

By John Daley
Mar. 7, 2024

Abortion access — some states have outlawed it, others have seen scores of patients from out of state — has been in the news since the U.S. Supreme Court repealed the Constitutional right to an abortion two years ago. But looking back through history shows that unplanned pregnancies and access to abortions have been in the news for a long, long time.

More than a century ago, readers of the Rocky Mountain News learned about the death of a young woman who worked in a shop named Maude, who was trying to terminate a pregnancy. A woman named Mrs. Proctor, the wife of the manager of a “remedy company,” was charged with manslaughter in Maude’s death.

Continued: https://www.cpr.org/2024/03/07/denver-public-library-history-of-abortion-access-in-colorado/

Ghana – Student in critical condition after abortion attempt destroyed her womb

Saturday, 13 January 2024

The Assin Fosu District Court presided by His Worship, Abdul Majid Iliasu has fined a 40-year-old hairdresser Gh¢4,800.00 for inducing a 17-year-old girl to commit abortion with a noxious abortion medication.

The convict, Charlotte Asiedu on count one, was charged with illegal abortion contrary to section 58 of the Criminal and Other Offences Act 29.

Continued: https://www.ghanaweb.live/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Student-in-critical-condition-after-abortion-attempt-destroyed-her-womb-1911992

13.01.2024

Criminal and Other Offences Act 29

Ursula K. Le Guin on Her Illegal Abortion in 1950

“I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.”

By Arwen Curry
September 13, 2023

The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the iconic author. In the first of the series, Elisabeth Le Guin and Caroline Le Guin reflect on “What It Was Like,” in which Ursula reads from her essay of the same name about the illegal abortion she had while studying at Radcliffe.

As young women growing up under the protection of Roe, we never really talked with our mother about her abortion. Elisabeth learned that it had occurred when she went through several abortions of her own in the 1980s; but what we know about the story of Ursula’s necessarily different experience comes to us through her written words, as it does to you. “The Princess” was her keynote address to NARAL Pro-Choice America in 1982 when Roe was not even a decade old, and this piece, “What It Was Like,” was a talk for Oregon’s NARAL chapter in 2004. These stories are public statements, performances of Ursula’s own life material as a means to inspire and transform. The second of them, which you are about to hear, is also a rather extraordinary public love letter to her own family.

Continued: https://lithub.com/watch-ursula-k-le-guin-on-her-illegal-abortion-in-1950/

13.09.2023