Gov't, feminists sending us wide on abortion, say pro-lifers

Sunday, November 08, 2009 1:35 AM

News

BY ALICIA DUNKLEY Observer staff reporter dunkleya@jamaicaobserver.com

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

PRO-LIFE groups, unwilling to go down without a fight over proposals to legalise abortion, yesterday accused the Government of colluding with feminist groups to lead the nation wide on false pretexts.

"In Parliament we were told that it was an issue of public health concern, it was an issue of maternal mortality. Women were dying, the Government had to do something about it so we decided to follow the trail to see whether this was so. What we found is that they were sending us wide. This is not so," Dr Wayne West, member of advocacy group the Coalition for the Defence of Life, told a breakfast meeting on the issue of abortion at the Catholic-run Corpus Christi Monastery in Kingston yesterday.

"We are at a place in Jamaica where the legalisation of abortion is being advanced by the feminist movement under the pretext of a public health concern, and I believe this was done in collaboration with technical personnel from the Ministry of Health," West said.

West, a medical practitioner, said the grounds given by the Abortion Policy Review Advisory Group (APRAG) in support of the legalisation of abortion have been falsified by local data. APRAG was set up in 2005 by former minister of health, John Junor, amidst concerns that abortion was the third leading cause of death in adolescents and that unsafe abortions constituted the eighth leading cause of maternal deaths in Jamaica.

The report, though handed over to Junor in 2005, was not tabled until January 2008.

"The first argument we were given is that Jamaica has a high rate of illegally induced abortions. APRAG said according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures there were 35 abortions per 1,000 by women aged 15 to 44 years and that Jamaica probably had over 22,000 abortions per year; but research done by the Jamaica National Family Board and the Statistical Institute of Jamaica for 2002 to 2003 said the rate of abortion in Jamaica is low and accordingly the number of respondents reporting that they ever had an abortion is very small," West argued.

"This is government statistics, so we were saying why is a government-commissioned instrument using WHO figures when the government has statistics to the contrary?" he queried, noting that some of the members of APRAG were from the agencies that collected that data.

Referring to APRAG's argument that 'many women were dying from illegal abortions, which is a leading cause of maternal mortality', West said using the Access to Information Act it was found out that in 2001, of the 35 reported maternal deaths, only one was linked to abortion.

Furthermore, he said that according to the Ministry of Health's own statistics, from 2001 to 2007 there were three deaths due to abortion of a total 273 deaths.

Hypertension, cardiac disease and sickle cell disease, among others, were identified as the leading causes of the deaths, with abortion accounting for only a small number of
those deaths.

West further queried why, if the Government was convinced that the WHO was correct, it mandated the Vital Statistics Commission to look into the WHO statistics.

"They said the commission needed to investigate why Jamaica is being characterised by WHO as lacking appropriate data and being assessed at a much higher maternal mortality rate than is the reality," he said.

He also pushed aside arguments that Jamaica needed to legalise abortion in order to conform to United Nations treaties and conventions.

"We checked the treaties and no UN treaty or convention signed or ratified by Jamaica includes abortion as a reproductive right or places Jamaica under any obligation to legalise abortion," he pointed out.

"Why this trail of misinformation? Why are we being told that we need to legalise abortion?," West asked. ".We have the arguments to say it is tunnel vision, it is a case of the emperor's new clothes."

He said that APRAG's stance was based on the same philosophy which drove the Johannesburg initiative which advocated full access to abortion for women, adding that this was obvious from the number of references made by APRAG to conclusions drawn by that movement.

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