[Marxism] NYT: Editorial Abortion Rights in Latin America

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(NYT: "Abortion is legal on demand in the region only in Cuba".

(This may explain the Bush regime's desperate efforts to secure
condemnations of Cuba a human rights abuser. In fact, Cuba is the
best defender of women's rights in the region, as this indicates.
It also provides proof that the New York Times's relentless and
nearly 100% consistent hostility toward Cuba is at odds even with
its own policy prescriptionf for the U.S. and Latin America, at
least in this one respect. Cuba is a shining example in this area.)

http://www.granma.cu/especial_1/ingles/e_006_i.html
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Editorial
Abortion Rights in Latin America

Published: January 6, 2006

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates
and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In
most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is
far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia -
where abortion is illegal even if a woman's life is in danger -
averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile
years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over
the course of her reproductive years.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos
keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing
abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to
private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it
themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin
America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

Abortion is legal on demand in the region only in Cuba, and a few
other countries permit it for extreme circumstances, mostly when the
mother's life is at risk, the fetus will not live or the pregnancy is
the result of rape. Even when pregnancies do qualify for legal
abortions, women are often denied them because anti-abortion local
medical officials and priests intervene, the requirements are
unnecessarily stringent, or women do not want to incur the public
shame of reporting rape.

But Latin Americans are beginning to look at abortion as an issue of
maternal mortality, not just maternal morality. Where they have been
conducted, polls show that Latin Americans support the right to
abortion under some circumstances. Decriminalization, at least in
part, is being seriously discussed in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela,
Uruguay and Argentina, and perhaps will be on the agenda after the
presidential election in July in Mexico.

International pressure is helping. In November, the United Nations
Human Rights Committee decided that Peru had violated a woman's
rights when a hospital denied an abortion to a 17-year-old carrying a
severely malformed fetus, who died shortly after birth. United
Nations conferences on women also have forced governments to track
and publish their progress on expanding women's rights. This has
emboldened women's groups and led to the creation of government
offices on women's issues, which have helped the push for abortion
rights.

Latin American women, who are increasing their participation in the
work force and in politics, have also become more vocal. Their voice
would be much louder were it not for the Bush administration's global
gag rule, which bans any family planning group that gets American
money from speaking about abortions, or even criticizing unsafe
illegal abortions. This has silenced such respected and influential
groups as Profamilia in Colombia. Anti-abortion lawmakers in
Washington can look at Latin America as a place where the global gag
rule has worked exactly as they had hoped. All Americans can look at
Latin America to see unnecessary deaths and injuries from unsafe
abortions.



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