The UK Department for International Development (DFID) announced last week that it will donate E3 million over the next 2 years to the Global Safe Abortion Programme, a new initiative administered by the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF). To help raise awareness of unsafe abortions, DFID commissioned a report from the IPPF, Death and Denial: Unsafe Abortion and Poverty, which was published to coincide with DFID's funding announcement. According to the report, 19 million (9%) pregnancies are unsafely terminated every year, resulting in the deaths of 70 000 mothers-13% of the yearly 500 000 maternal deaths.The report highlights the two-way causal relation between poverty and unsafe abortions: poor women are more likely to have unsafe abortions than well-off women; and the high mortality and morbidity caused by unsafe abortions leave many families impoverished. But family-planning NGOs have been hampered in their attempts to combat this problem by the strict anti-abortion stance of the USA, which refuses to fund organisations that promote safe-abortion services. The USglobal gag rule, known officially as the Mexico City Policy, mandates that US money cannot be given to groups that promote or discuss safe-abortion services, even if they pay for those services with money from other sources. This policy was initially put in place by President Reagan in 1984, revoked by President Clinton in 1993, and subsequently reinstated by President Bush in January, 2001.
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