Global Gag Rule Raised Abortion Rates, Study Finds

Lowering abortion rates was the goal of a federal policy requiring nonprofits to stop talking about abortion services or promoting abortion rights, but according to a new report from the World Health Organization, the result of the “global gag rule” in Africa was just the opposite: abortion rates rose.

Stanford University researchers analyzed demographic and health surveys of 20 African nations for the years 2001 to 2008, when the Bush administration restored the Reagan-era “Mexico City policy” that President Clinton had overturned. It barred federal funds to all non-governmental organizations operating abroad that either provided abortion services, counseled women on abortion or advocated more liberal abortion laws.

As a result, the researchers found, groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation had to close clinics and scale back their programs in the studied countries. In many poor African countries, such clinics are often the primary providers of women’s basic health care, including family planning services. Sampling 260,000 women of childbearing age, the researchers found that unplanned pregnancies rose in all those countries, and so did abortions, more than doubling in places where U.S. support for NGOs was cut the most.

“We had no idea what the effect would look like,” said researcher Eran Bendavid. “What we found surprised us: this policy seems to have unintended consequences.”

The loss of access to contraceptives led women to seek abortions as a form of birth control, argued Bendavid and the other researchers, Grant Miller and Patrick Avila, in their study that was published in the World Health Bulletin [link]. But abortion is illegal in most of the countries examined, so women injured in unsafe illegal abortion attempts had fewer places to go to seek treatment, and many more died.

“This evidence confirms what we have seen on the ground,” said Latanya Mapp Frett, vice president for global affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “In reality the [gag rule] policy leads to more unintended pregnancies, more unsafe abortions and more women dying from completely preventable causes.”

“The analysis shows that the stakes in this issue transcend political ideology,” Bendavid said. “Effective foreign policy must now consider the implications for maternal health in places where abortion is unsafe.”

Source: http://www.planetwire.org/