A high proportion of maternal deaths are caused by abortion, especially induced abortion. This cross-sectional study determined the prevalence of illegally-induced abortion prior to admittance and its associated risk factors in 8 maternity hospitals in Isfahan, Islamic Republic of Iran, during 2003-04. In confidential interviews with 417 women who attended the hospitals with abortion, 50 (12.0%...

Since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion, many states have enacted laws restricting women’s access to an abortion. There has been considerable empirical research on the impact of these restrictive state abortion laws on women’s pregnancy resolution decisions. This paper reviews the empirical evidence regarding restrictions on abortion access. The empirical evidence indicates ...

In doing so, two aspects of Australian abortion law are highlighted: first, that abortion is a criminal offence; and second, that therefore Australian law denies women a right to abortion. The article dispels the myth that there exists 'abortion-on-demand' in Australia, and argues that any 'rights' that exist with respect to the practice of abortion are possessed and exercised by the medical pr...

This paper examines the ways in which young women demonstrated strategies of resistance to internalised abortion stigma. It does so through secondary analysis of young women’s narratives from two qualitative studies in England and Wales. Whilst participants felt stigmatised by their abortion[s] in different ways, many also resisted stigmatisation. They did this through different stigma resistan...

Two hundred and sixty married women seeking induced abortion service in Hanoi, Vietnam were interviewed to determine the magnitude of repeat induced abortion and explore selected characteristics of the repeat aborters. Seventy-one percent of the sample reported having had at least one previous induced abortion. After adjustment for age and number of living children, poor attitudes toward contra...

Although the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of i...

BACKGROUND Women who have more than one abortion are often the "targets" for social and clinical interventions geared at preventing "repeat abortions." Such an approach ignores the unique circumstances that may surround each abortion. STUDY DESIGN We qualitatively analyzed the history of 10 women who have had more than one abortion who were participating in a larger study of women's emotional...

To document the relative contribution of abortion-related deaths to overall maternal deaths in Mexico, official mortality data were analyzed according to International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. During 1990-2008, among 24 805 maternal deaths, 1786 (7.2%) were abortion related. Of these, 13.2% occurred in adolescents and 65% in uninsured women; 60% were probably associated with unsa...

©FSRH J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2008: 34(3) Introduction More than 2001000 women have an abortion each year in Great Britain.1,2 There is extensive experience of providing abortion care; with this are associated some widely held but inaccurate views on how to assist (or in some cases obstruct) women at the decision-making stage. The socalled ‘post-abortion traumatic stress syndrome’ is not...

INTRODUCTION The rate of unsafe abortions in Kenya has increased from 32 per 1000 women of reproductive age in 2002 to 48 per 1000 women in 2012. This is one of the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2010, Kenya changed its Constitution to include a more enabling provision regarding the provision of abortion services. Abortion-related stigma has been identified as a key driver in silencing women...