Tuesday 27 January 2009

Abortion and its impact on families

It is a worldwide issue, abortion is getting in a wider range that nearly 46 million pregnancies are terminated every year; this can be seen as one-fifth of all pregnancies. According to a resource, it says there are some countries allow abortion and some of them are on a limited health ground of abortion.

Of the 133 countries in this study, 49 allow abortion on request or on broad social and health grounds. Only 13 of these nations are in developing regions and include Bangladesh, India, China, Tunisia, Turkey, South Africa, and Cuba. Another 40 countries—including six developed countries—permit abortion on limited health grounds. It is quite astonishing when we look at these figures and try to find out the reasons and the motivations of having abortions.

Abortion evolved from those unwanted pregnancy where women would usually take high risks, only to abandon their unborn babies. Whether it is legal or illegal, surely that now has becoming a prevalent trend from careless contraception. Laws are remained to be liberal where health problems should be a significant concern; there's nearly 70,000 women die each year and for sure, this is a quite serious number as there's one die in every 7 minutes.

Here's something that I think is quite important. Restrictive abortion policies mainly affect the poor who rely on the public sector for all their health needs; women who have the means can usually obtain abortions from the private sector. Women are likely to have the priority to obtain their needs from the private sector while the policies have been an influence on poor who can only get helps from the public sector.

How does abortion affect on families? In fact, abortion does not only impact on women but also the family itself. As we can imagine that abortion is a wound of marriage, it means the complicated situations between wife and husband, either conducted by disagreement or fear in misunderstanding. A child is also a human life where has the equal right as everyone else, it's a serious problem to solve and the decision-making is also a dilemma.

If we hypothesise a woman has been insisted to give an abortion by her husband, the possible reaction of this woman would likely to have different attitude towards her view of the family as time goes on. In the mean time, the woman has a child after the previous abortion, it seems to be a replacement of her grief from that unborn child; but actually things are not always this simple. It is interesting yet serious that why women would change their emotion towards this. It might be a feeling of segregated from the first child, feeling alienated and apathy towards the family.

Whether abortion is legal or not, the best solution should always stay on the principle of being more careful on contraception; even it has become inevitably unavoidable, women really need to consider more wisely about the consequences of abortion would brings along.

2 comments:

chris sivewright said...

Make sure you re-read ALL your Sociology blog posts before Wednesday evening!

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