Study: Abortion India is 20 times higher than reporter, 15.6 million babies aborted in 2015
A recently-released study estimates that abortion in India is 20 times higher than previous estimates – 15.6 million children aborted in 2015 alone.
The Guttmacher Institute published the data, noting that most of these abortions take place outside legally approved facilities and are done by medications without a prescription.
Just over 80 percent of abortions took place using drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol, 14 percent were performed surgically in clinics and hospitals, and 5 percent were conducted using other, typically unsafe, methods.
photo: 14 week fetus photo/ Your Pregnancy week by week
“Women in India face considerable challenges trying to obtain abortion care, including the limited availability of abortion services in public health facilities,” the Guttmacher Institute’s investigator Susheela Singh, said in a statement.
Half of India’s more than 48 million pregnancies were unintended, and a third resulted in abortions, the study said.
“Our findings suggest that a shortage of trained staff and inadequate supplies and equipment are the primary reasons many public facilities don’t provide abortion care,” she said of the study, published in the Lancet Global Health journal.
What is the response? Abortion advocates called on New Delhi to liberalize India’s abortion law even further, past the 20-week gestation limit, even though India’s law is already among the most liberal of its kind in Asia: abortions between 12 and 20 weeks require two doctors’ approval and beyond 20 weeks, abortion is only permitted to save the life of the mother.
Yes, 15.6 million abortions is NOT enough, pro-abortion groups want more death.
“Although abortion has been legal under a broad range of criteria in India since 1971, we have never had a reliable estimate of the number occurring until now,” said Chander Shekhar from the Mumbai-based International Institute for Population Sciences, which collaborated on the study.
“This new evidence provides policymakers with information that is essential for designing and implementing effective reproductive health care programs,” he added in a statement.
Life Site News notes that “The 15.6 million annual abortions figure is staggering, even taking into account India’s large population size. The report points out that India’s unintended pregnancy rate is comparable to that of Nepal and Bangladesh and lower than that of Pakistan. It says that about half of pregnancies in India are unintended, a similar figure to that in the United States.”
