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by Abbey Marr, Amplify front page blogger There has been a lot of coverage this past week about the Guttmacher Institute's new report "Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress", which shows contraceptive use up and abortion laws becoming more liberal worldwide, and, correspondingly, abortion rates down worldwide. This is great news and shows what family planning advocates have been arguing for years; if you want to lower abortion rates, if you want to lower the rates of women dying and being injured from unsafe abortion, then you need to make contraceptives readily available and abortion legal.
The report also confirms another argument commonly used by abortion rights advocates; abortion rates do not correspond to abortion's legal status- making abortion illegal does not make abortion rates go down, it just puts women at risk.
I'm hopeful, because this report shows a modest trend in the right direction, but I am also tired. None of this is new. Research institutes such as Guttmacher and public health organizations such as the World Health Organization have shown evidence of the need for family planning and realistic policies around abortion for years, and yet this new report made the news as if it was saying something new. I am tired of fighting about these issues and having politics used to undermine facts about women's lives. This report is a confirmation and a call to action to keep fighting for reproductive freedom if we want reproductive health, but it shouldn't be necessary. We should be past this- fighting about how we are going to ensure women's reproductive health, not whether or not women's reproductive health is in trouble.
The Guttmacher Report is fascinating and shows many nuances in reproductive health worldwide, but its frustrating that what it says is controversial news- that women's lives are better and healthier when we can make decisions about our own bodies.
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