ABSTRACT
Every day, women like these present to hospital wards in Thailand with complications of illegal abortions. Despite restrictive abortion laws, it is estimated that between 80,000 and 300,000 abortions are performed each year, many using unsafe methods. Although many women experience no complications, others experience injury, infection, infertility and maternal death (Koetsawang et al. 1978, Narkavonnakit 1979, Chaturachinda et al. 1981, Narkavonnakit and Benett 1981, The Population Council 1981, Ladipo 1989). My interest in the issue began in 1991 when I first started fieldwork in Northeast Thailand, studying women’s reproductive health. Among the women I knew well in my field site of Ban Srisaket, abortion was a whispered subject that few women spoke of to me. The elderly woman whose house I shared claimed no knowledge of the practice of abortion in the community, yet I found out from her daughter that her Aunt had died from an abortion, after attempting to induce an abortion following the insertion of some twigs into her uterus. Other women I interviewed were more
forthcoming about their experiences of abortion. Some spoke in a matter of fact manner about their past abortions, others spoke of the fear and pain they experienced and the subsequent guilt over the Buddhist sin they had incurred. I met midwives who spoke of how they had helped women abort in the past through massage techniques ‘but not any more’.
