Marie Stopes

This week, London played host to the world's first international conference on safe abortion. 800 delegates from over 60 countries around the world attended, and openDemocracy was there to report, speaking to advocates, practitioners and campaigners.

In these first blog reactions, Jane Gabriel reports on the scale of the problem, one woman's amazing work in Ghana, and says it's time to break the silence on gender and power. Jessica Reed investigates the medical abortion revolution, anti-choice tactics, and abortion as a human right. Plus: crossing borders for abortion and the inspiring work of clandestine providers.

Abortion as a human right

A lot of the speakers at the Global Safe Abortion Conference addressed the right to safe abortion as a human right.

Luisa Cabal, director of the Center for Reproductive Rights' International Legal Program, underlined the fact that human rights are a universal language, a common ground to build on, and a tool for governments to save women's lives. [more...]

by Jane Gabriel

Legal barriers, sheer physical pain, stigma and fear are not reducing women's demand for abortion, and the number of unsafe abortions is still rising. What is driving this need and this demand by women?

The conference was the world's first international conference on safe abortion, and at the plenary session declared that it had broken the silence of this "preventable pandemic" (Lancet).

An eternal clash

Upon our arrival at the conference at an early 8.30 in the morning we were greeted by a group of anti-choice women silently picketing the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, holding a huge banner stating that "women deserve better than abortions" (ironically enough, my colleague Jane Gabriel remarked that the banner was folded in such a way that at the right angle it read "women deserve better abortions"). I was also handed misguided pro-life leaflets stating (amongst other things) that Marie Stopes was racist. [more...]

by Jane Gabriel

At independence Ghana inherited the restrictive British law on abortion, and it wasn't liberalised until 1985. In Ghana today between 20% and 30% of all maternal deaths in Ghana are directly related to unsafe abortion.

Nearly 60 years after Professor Sai came to London, Faustina Fynn Nyame was working in a London hospital. One of the women who came to her for help had had an ‘abortion'. What the young woman did not know until then was that the abortionist had removed her ovaries, her womb and her uterus. Like Professor Sai, this woman's story decided Faustina's life's work. She returned to Ghana to work for safe abortion, she opened a Marie Stopes Centre. She worked alone for the first year. One year on she has thirty two paid staff, 35 franchised service providers of safe abortions, three centres and an outreach team - and no-one is denied an abortion because they cannot afford it.

Dr. Hilary Bracken, Senior Program Associate with Gynuity Health Project, opened the session titled "Ensuring Women's access to medical abortion in their own communities" declaring that medical abortion (the abortion pill, or RU486) is the most important revolution in women's medical health since the commercialisation of the contraceptive pill. [more...]

The plight of the many women having to undertake long, distressing, often expensive journeys in order to gain access to safe abortion due to restrictive legislation in their home countries was the focus of discussion on day one of the conference.