ABSTRACT
In October 1988, physicians and women's health advocates from 35 countries met in Rio de Janeiro at the Christopher Tietze International Symposium on Women's Health in the Third World: The Impact of Unwanted Pregnancies. Demographers and health officials estimate that 100 to 200 thousand women in developing countries die every year from the effects of clandestine abortion. Highly restrictive laws such as these are found in a majority of developing countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the more fundamentalist Islamic nations. The consequence of this double standard is that women in developing countries who are most in need of safe abortion services because of contraceptive scarcity, failure, misuse, or nonuse are the least likely to have a legal right to safe procedures. Death rates from clandestine abortion in developing countries can reach as high as 400 per 100,000 procedures, according to some estimates, compared with six deaths per 100,000 procedures where abortion is legal.
