Observing Human Rights Day (10 December), Australia’s leading sexual and reproductive healthcare organisation today called on governments to support a woman’s fundamental right to safe, affordable and legal abortion.

“A woman’s right to choose the spacing and timing of her family has been internationally recognised as a human right since the 1960’s – yet in Australia abortion is still considered a crime,” said Suzanne Dvorak, Australian CEO of Marie Stopes International.

“The retention of abortion in state criminal codes stigmatises aborting women and couples, reducing their access to accurate information and their willingness to seek timely support.

“In 2002, abortion was repealed from the Crimes Act in the ACT and, on Human Rights Day, it is time the rest of Australia follows.

“All levels of government need to work together to remove abortion from the criminal code and remove the risk of prosecution against women and their doctors.”

Human Rights Day is observed by the international community every year on 10 December. It commemorates the day in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This year’s observation for Human Rights Day is ‘Fighting Poverty: a matter of obligation, not charity’.

“Unfortunately when we look overseas, unsafe abortions in the developing world continue to kill 68,000 women a year,” Ms Dvorak said.

“Recent studies have also found that they lead to at least five million other people going to hospital for infection and other complications.

The Lancet study, ‘Unsafe abortion: the preventable pandemic’[1], was based on data from 13 countries, with the findings suggesting around 19 million unsafe abortions take place around the world each year.

According to the report’s authors: “Ending the silent pandemic of unsafe abortion is an urgent public-health and human-rights imperative….The underlying causes of morbidity and mortality from unsafe abortion today are not blood loss and infection but, rather, apathy and disdain toward women.”

The Marie Stopes International Global Partnership is committed to reducing maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion through improved access to reproductive health services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and the provision of quality abortion services in countries where the procedure is legal.

“A death as a result of an unsafe abortion is a needless death - many of the women seeking an abortion are married and most are poor and struggling to provide for the children they already have,” Ms Dvorak said.

“Access to safe, legal abortion is a fundamental right of women, irrespective of where they live, and more work needs to be done to ensure this is the case.”

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[1]‘Unsafeabortion: the preventable pandemic’, Grimes DA, Benson J, Singh S, Romero M, Ganatra B, Okonofua F E, Shah IH, The Lancet - Vol. 368, Issue 9550, 25 November 2006, pp1908-1919.