Unwanted pregnancies: Forced into life-threatening abortions

Lack of family planning resulting in 0.9m abortions yearly.

ISLAMABAD:

Failure of family planning programme in Pakistan and apathy of public health authorities drove about 900,000 women to abort their pregnancies last year.

Most of these procedures were unsafe and the resulting complications sent almost 200,000 women to hospitals.

This was revealed during a presentation given to a group of parliamentarians by a member of Rahnuma Family Planning Association of Pakistan (RFPAP), a non-profit organization, during an open hearing on violence against women.

The presentation was based on a survey report titled “Pakistan on the move: Achieving our economic and development goals”, prepared by the National Committee for Maternal and Neonatal Health, RFPAP and ENGAGE Project.

To put things into perspective, about three million children are born in Pakistan every year, thus bringing the total number of conceptions  to about four million, of which a quarter are aborted.

An abortion in Pakistan is legally allowed if the pregnancy poses threat to the mother’s life or if the mother’s mental or physical health is unsuitable to bear the child. Abortions are also legally allowed in rape cases. However abortions are illegal in case of fetal defects, socio-economic factors or any other reason.

According to the report, most of the abortions were performed to get rid of unplanned pregnancies, as most women do not have the option of adopting family planning methods. The husband, in such cases, has been found to be against family planning, said the NGO representative. One out of every three pregnancies in Pakistan is unplanned.

Since abortion in such a case is not legally allowed, many women are forced to seek non-professional help, which is unsafe and could pose a threat to the woman’s life.

Most women who have abortions in Pakistan are aged thirty or above and have three or more children, according to the report.

“About 25 per cent of Pakistani women would prefer to stop having children or wait for two or more years before having another child. These women have an unmet need for family planning,” said the report.

The report said, “Eighty per cent of women having three or more children were going for abortions in the absence of family planning and modern contraception methods in Pakistan.”

The report found that just 22 per cent of married women – 30 per cent of women in urban areas and 18 per cent of women in rural areas – in Pakistan use modern family planning methods. It did not specify, however, whether the rate of such abortions was higher in rural or urban areas.

The report added that on average, each family in Pakistan has four children, compared to two in Indonesia and Iran.

‘Better implementation of laws needed’

While all parliamentarians at the presentation agreed that women deserve access to better reproductive health facilities, they felt that what is lacking is not the laws, but their implementation. They argued that the laws already in place are sufficient and require proper implementation.

“Laws for protection of women are being grossly misused by people, particularly in the districts of Punjab. One way of stopping them is stricter penalties,” suggested Sheikh Waqas Akram from Pakistan Muslim League-Q.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 23^rd, 2011.