{"title":"Abortion safety: At home and abroad.","authors":"Ingrid Scop","doi":"","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the U.S., legal abortion is considered extremely safe, and abortion-related mortality is reported to be far lower than mortality associated with term childbirth. Yet, the voluntary nature of abortion complication reporting and ideological selection biases obscure the poor quality of the data used to support these assumptions. Worldwide, the World Health Organization reports that illegal abortion is extremely unsafe, killing and injuring vast numbers of women yearly. They advocate for the liberalization of abortion laws so that women can access safer abortions. Yet, their calculations are based largely on subjective opinions from a limited number of health care providers, with little objective verification from external sources. The limitations in the data should prompt calls for improved studies and more objective estimates of complications and deaths resulting from abortion, both legal and illegal.</p>","PeriodicalId":48665,"journal":{"name":"Issues in Law & Medicine","volume":"34 1","pages":"43-75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Issues in Law & Medicine","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In the U.S., legal abortion is considered extremely safe, and abortion-related mortality is reported to be far lower than mortality associated with term childbirth. Yet, the voluntary nature of abortion complication reporting and ideological selection biases obscure the poor quality of the data used to support these assumptions. Worldwide, the World Health Organization reports that illegal abortion is extremely unsafe, killing and injuring vast numbers of women yearly. They advocate for the liberalization of abortion laws so that women can access safer abortions. Yet, their calculations are based largely on subjective opinions from a limited number of health care providers, with little objective verification from external sources. The limitations in the data should prompt calls for improved studies and more objective estimates of complications and deaths resulting from abortion, both legal and illegal.
期刊介绍:
Issues in Law & Medicine is a peer reviewed professional journal published semiannually. Founded in 1985, ILM is co-sponsored by the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent & Disabled, Inc. and the Watson Bowes Research Institute.
Issues is devoted to providing technical and informational assistance to attorneys, health care professionals, educators and administrators on legal, medical, and ethical issues arising from health care decisions. Its subscribers include law libraries, medical libraries, university libraries, court libraries, attorneys, physicians, university professors and other scholars, primarily in the U.S. and Canada, but also in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.