The fight for safe abortion

Grace Davies and openDemocracy, 2 November 2007
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openDemocracy speaks to those on the frontline of the fight to end a global scandal. Listen now
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Grace Davies is new media editor at the BBC World Service Trust. She was managing editor of openDemocracy.

Last week, London played host to a landmark international conference on safe abortion. Eight hundred delegates from over sixty countries were in attendance, and openDemocracy was there to report.

The statistics on unsafe abortion speak for themselves: 100 million women alive today will have an unsafe abortion and more than 13% of them will die as a direct result. 68,000 women die a year as a direct result of an unsafe abortion - that is one woman every 8 minutes. Of the 42 million known abortions a year, 20 million of them will be unsafe.

Many of the conference delegates were campaigners and advocates working on the frontline to ensure universal access to safe abortion for women worldwide. Grace Davies spoke to, among others, Monica Roa of Women's Link Worldwide in Colombia, Jon O'Brien of Catholics for a Free Choice and Gilberta Soares of the Brazilian Campaign for Safe Abortion. Listen now to hear more about their work.

To read more blog reports on the issues raised at the conference, click here.

The music you heard in today's podcast was from Melissa Thompson's excellent documentary Like A Ship In The Night.

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