Preventing the Need for Abortion

Washington, DC - January 29, 2007

Worldwide, nearly 80 million unintended pregnancies occur each year, with over half of them ending in abortion—even in countries where the procedure is illegal. These unintended pregnancies—and resulting abortions—could be prevented if women had access to the reproductive services and supplies, including condoms and emergency contraception, they want and need to determine if and when to conceive a child. The global community must fund reproductive health programs worldwide—these supplies, services and education are crucial to improving and saving lives that might otherwise be lost to maternal mortality and unsafe abortion.

In Uganda an estimated 775,000 unintended pregnancies a year result in at least 297,000 abortions. This is despite the fact that abortion is illegal, except to save a woman’s life. Shockingly, a recent study reports that one-third of Ugandan women of reproductive age want to stop or delay pregnancy but don’t use modern contraceptives. It is tragic that the lives of these women are put at risk because they lack access to the reproductive health supplies and services that are taken for granted in other parts of the world.

Uganda is just one of many countries where women lack the knowledge or supplies necessary to make their own decisions about if and when to have a child. Over 200 million women worldwide want to avoid pregnancy, but are not using any form of modern contraception. Family planning programs providing access to modern contraceptives, disease screening and prenatal care have led to declines in maternal mortality resulting from unsafe abortion and complications from high-risk pregnancies.

But many of these programs are at risk—funding shortages, burdensome policies and the heavy and still growing number of those suffering from HIV/AIDS and other diseases have made it increasingly difficult for family planning and reproductive health programs to adequately serve the women and men they are trying to reach.

Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortion from happening—but we can all agree that averting unintended pregnancy does. The good news is that increased use of contraception has been accompanied by significant declines in abortion rates in a number of countries, including Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Russia and Chile. Expanding access to voluntary family planning programs is a key—and proven—way to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and, consequently, to reduce the incidence of abortion.

Population Action International (PAI) works to improve individual well-being and preserve global resources by mobilizing political and financial support for population, family planning and reproductive health policies and programs.