So the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology has published a study of women who resort to a website called Women on Web for abortion medicines. For £55 a time, these women receive mifepristone pills and misoprostol pills in the post. When taken in combination the pills result in a terminated pregnancy, and they can be used up until the ninth week.
However, the study also showed that 11 per cent of the women needed subsequent surgical procedures, due to incomplete procedures or excessive bleeding. Now anti-abortion campaigners have voiced their concerns. “This is very worrying indeed”, they have said. “”It represents further trivialisation of the value of the unborn child. It’s like taking abortion into the shadows”.
Now then, would you be surprised to learn that the women who resort to this Women on Web site are from 70 countries including Northern Ireland, in which safe, supervised abortions are heavily restricted?
As a chap from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists pointed out on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning, “Access to illegal termination services is extremely hazardous in any case and it may well be that this is a safer form of termination than illegal surgical methods, which may be the only alternative they have.”
And just in case we’d forgotten what it’s like to live in a place in which women’s rights over their bodies are severely curtailed, here’s a reminder.
Surely, if there is anything “worrying” here, it is that these poor women have to skulk “in the shadows” and resort to terminations-by-post in the first place?
Growl.
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