Development & Aid, Headlines, Health, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS: Abortion Debate Surfaces in the Caribbean

Peter Richards

CASTRIES, Sep 24 2003 (IPS) - It is a picture the St. Lucia government would have preferred not to view: a pregnant Home Affairs Minister Sara Flood Beaubrun walking alongside more than 2,500 citizens protesting against plans to amend the criminal code to allow abortion in certain cases, including rape and incest.

“In all true democracies that I know of, there are certain subject matters that ministers of government are allowed to speak on according to their consciences, and the abortion issue is one of those,” Flood Beaubrun told reporters during the march last week.

“It would be sad if it had to come to me losing my job over this, but I am prepared to lose my job and more, for this cause,” she added.

The government says it has temporarily shelved the introduction of the legislation in order to provide for more public debate.

Attorney General Petrus Compton says that may mean ”delaying the bill for another month or two or three”, while Flood Beaubrun says that time should be used to educate citizens ”including cabinet ministers on the real evil of abortion and what it really means”.

”To be honest I do not think they really understand,” she later told IPS, as St. Lucia became the latest Caribbean state to become engaged in the controversial debate on legalising abortion.

Like most of the region’s states where the issue is being debated, St. Lucia has no statistics on abortions done in the country, although citizens say local doctors perform them regularly.

Compton says it is ”an insult to doctors” to paint them as a greedy bunch, who, if the measure becomes law, ”will suddenly open their clinics to become abortion houses”.

”That is the scenario that is being painted and it is unfair,” he said in an interview published last weekend.

Jamaica’s medical community, led by the Medical Association of Jamaica (MAJ), has long been lobbying the government for changes to the current abortion laws, which date to 1864.

The MAJ and others have often cited the Barbados law ‘The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (1983)’, as a precedent for change in the region.

That law provides for abortions on broad health grounds, however not on demand, but figures on the number of procedures performed in Barbados are not readily available.

Abortions are illegal in Jamaica.

Earlier this year, that country’s National Family Planning Board (NFPB) re-launched the ”morning after pill” to deal with the high rate of teenage pregnancies. A study in 2000 showed that 84 per cent of 15-19 year olds were interested in emergency contraception.

“With the availability of this pill, unplanned pregnancies and the number of abortions will be reduced,” said NFPB Director of Outreach Janet Davis.

The Trinidad-based Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity (ASPIRE) estimates that more than 20,000 abortions take place in Trinidad and Tobago annually, where the procedure is illegal.

It costs the country more than 166 thousand U.S. dollars a month to care for women suffering from botched abortions, it adds.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), every year unintended pregnancies lead to at least 20 million unsafe abortions, resulting in the deaths of some 80,000 women.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reported last year that five million women aged 15-19 have abortions every year, 40 per cent of which are performed under unsafe conditions.

According to the WHO, in developing countries unsafe abortions carry a high risk of death, with one of 250 procedures resulting in a fatality, compared to one of 3,700 in developed countries.

The region’s anti-abortion laws have their origin in Britain’s 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, the parent of abortion laws throughout the Commonwealth, including the Caribbean.

But abortion rights advocate argue that as long ago as 1967, Britain, where most of the English-speaking Caribbean islands’ laws originate, abandoned the idea of restricting abortions and legalised the procedure.

The non-government organisation (NGO), Caribbean Association for Feminist Research (CAFRA) is urging support for abortion rights and reproductive freedom for women.

”This basic right has been ignored for too long. Public policy should be based on objective assessments of social conditions and an informed appreciation of social aspirations,” it said in a statement regarding the controversy in St. Lucia.

CAFRA noted that in 1975 Caribbean health ministers made ”a commitment to review the law of abortion”, but there has been little or no change since then.

”Yet we continue to ignore the serious social challenges and the urgent need to provide women with safe and health conditions when they are faced with difficult choices about their own sexual and reproductive health,” it added.

Although she agrees that the abortion laws are outdated, Trinidad and Tobago Attorney General Glenda Morean-Phillip has said she is aware of public opinion and the furore that reopening the issue would evoke.

”If and when we have to look at the law, we also have be sensitive to public opinion to see where people would want that law to go and how far,” she told IPS recently.

ASPIRE’s Lynette Seebaran-Suite, a family lawyer, argues that there are areas where the illegality of abortion can be challenged.

”We have not found any prosecutions under the abortion law and therefore the law has not been tested. There have been some cases of manslaughter arising from the issue but never directly. There should be some clarification as to what doctors can do,” she said on radio last weekend.

But Patricia Roberts of the Trinidad-based group Lawyers for Christ describes abortion as ”an atrocity that wounds women and destroys relationships”.

”What kind of morality do we want in our leaders who will be making decisions about human embryo?” Roberts told IPS.

At the church service that preceded last week’s demonstration in St. Lucia, Roman Catholic Archbishop Kelvin Felix told worshippers, ”the children who have been aborted have no chance. We must be safe in our mother’s womb. We must not allow a mother’s womb to become a death chamber!”

As they left the church service, parishioners were handed leaflets that read, ”Adoption is the option”.