The maternal mortality rates in the countries were abortion is restricted are more likely caused by poor health care availability, then the fact that abortion is restrictied. It is comparing nations with the best health systems in the world to the ones with some of the worst. That article is twisting truth in more ways then one.
Did you actually read the study? It separates out abortion-related mortality vs. that from other pregnancy-related causes. Are you missing the fact that
illegal abortions
are poor health care—that only the affluent in such a situation may be able to afford to persuade a medical practitioner to perform an illegal procedure rather than the poor woman, who will seek any means available-- regardless of the health care available otherwise?
"Of the 46 million abortions occurring worldwide each year, 20 million are illegal. As was the case with affluent U.S. women in the years before Roe, a small proportion of women living in urban areas in some developing countries may be able to afford the services of a private physician who can perform a safe, if still illegal, abortion. Not so, however, for the vast majority who live in extreme poverty, in rural areas or otherwise without access to emergency hospital care for the treatment of complications of an abortion induced by crude and often dangerous traditional methods.
According to the World Health Organization, about 13% of the 500,000 deaths worldwide from pregnancy-related causes each year are associated with unsafe abortion; in Latin America, the proportion is as high as 21%. In Egypt, abortion-related problems are responsible for about one-fifth of all obstetric and gynecologic admissions. Indeed, in some developing countries, women suffering from complications of illegal abortion account for two of every three maternity hospital beds in large urban hospitals, consuming as much as one-half of obstetrics and gynecology budgets.
In some parts of the world, lay practitioners’ use of noninvasive techniques and the increasing availability of antibiotics may be having a positive impact in lowering infection rates associated with clandestine abortion procedures. (In the United States, abortion-related maternal deaths declined sharply following the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s.) Experience in country after country has shown, however, that reducing the need to resort to unsafe procedures and untrained practitioners—through legalization and bringing the provision of services into the open—has a direct and immediate effect on reducing abortion-related mortality and, therefore, overall maternal mortality rates.
Six months after abortion was legalized in Guyana in 1995, for example, admissions for septic and incomplete abortion dropped by 41%. Previously, septic abortion had been the third largest, and incomplete abortion the eighth largest, cause of admissions to the country’s public hospitals. Another stark example is Romania, where abortion was legally available from 1957 until 1966. The Ceaucescu regime then outlawed abortion in 1966 as part of its pronatalist policy, which led to soaring maternal death rates. Maternal death rates than fell dramatically once abortion was relegalized in 1990 after Ceaucescu’s ouster (see chart)."
This is an entirely separate issue from the morality or immorality of an abortion. It is about the likelihood of fatal consequences in a relatively safe and medically sound procedure vs. a septic, backstreet one. The key is to reduce or eliminate the need/desire for abortions by reducing the factors that lead to it as much as possible.
