Facts about Abortion

In Bangladesh, abortion is illegal, but the government has long supported a network of "menstrual regulation clinics," where menstrual extraction (manual vacuum aspiration) can be performed as menstrual hygiene.

A strong argument for permitting legal abortions has been to eliminate unsafe methods carried out without the support of the medical community, which were commonplace in societies where abortion was illegal.

Both are used to indicate the central principles in arguments for and against abortion: "Is the fetus a human being with a fundamental right to life?"

St. Thomas Aquinas lumped abortion with contraception and as crimes against nature and sins against marriage—sins of a different category than murder.

Physical means of inducing abortion, such as battery, exercise, and tightening the girdle—special bands were sometimes worn in pregnancy to support the belly—were reported among English women during the early modern period.

Religious ethics also has an influence upon both personal opinion and the greater debate over abortion.

The technique of massage abortion, involving the application of pressure to the pregnant abdomen, has been practiced in Southeast Asia for centuries.

Added to the controversy over abortion, women may find it difficult to process these conflicting emotions and to go through the grieving process.

The first authoritative collection of Canon law by John Gratian (1140) held that the moral crime of early abortion was not equivalent to that of homicide.

Various methods of abortion were documented regionally in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Abortion debates, especially pertaining to abortion laws, are often spearheaded by advocacy groups belonging to one of two camps.

Numerous methods of abortion were used; the more effective of which were exceedingly dangerous.

Elective abortion is vigorously challenged by those of the "pro-life" movement, which equates abortion with murder of the most innocent and defenseless.

The first recorded evidence of induced abortion is from a Chinese document which records abortions performed upon royal concubines in China between the years 500 and 515 B.C.E.

Traditional Chinese religions operate under the belief that life begins at birth, which led to a less restrictive view of abortion.

Orthodox Judaism prohibits elective abortions: "It is a capital crime to destroy the embryo in the womb" (Talmud, Sanhedrin 57b).

Abortion is sometimes attempted by causing trauma to the abdomen.

Dilation and curettage (D and C) is a standard gynecological procedure performed for a variety of reasons, including examination of the uterine lining for possible malignancy, investigation of abnormal bleeding, and abortion.

When used within 49 days gestation, approximately 92 percent of women undergoing medical abortion with a combined regimen completed it without surgical intervention.

Very late abortions can be induced by intact dilation and extraction (IDX) (also called intrauterine cranial decompression), which requires surgical decompression of the fetus's head before evacuation.

Religious, moral, and cultural sensibilities continue to influence abortion laws throughout the world.

The preference for male children is reported in many areas of Asia, and abortion used to limit female births has been reported in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India.

One of the bas reliefs decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, dated circa 1150, depicts a demon performing such an abortion upon a woman who has been sent to the underworld.

The second half of the twentieth century saw the liberalization of abortion laws in many countries.

Buddhism does, however, focus on a person's good intentions, creating leeway for those who pursue abortions in order to spare the unborn child a difficult life due to congenital deformities or other such hardships.

By the early twentieth century, countries began to legalize abortions when performed to protect the life or health of the woman.

Spontaneous abortions, generally referred to as miscarriages, occur when an embryo or fetus is lost due to natural causes before the twentieth week of gestation.

Some argue that abortion is wrong because it deprives the embryo of a valuable future.

Reported methods of unsafe, self-induced abortion include misuse of misoprostol, and insertion of non-surgical implements such as knitting needles and clothes hangers into the uterus.

Regarding abortion, the ethics debate usually surrounds the questions of whether an embryo has rights, and whether those rights should take precedence over a woman's.

Unsafe abortion remains a public health concern today due to the severity of its associated complications, such as incomplete abortion, sepsis, hemorrhage, and damage to internal organs.

A few nations ban abortion entirely: Chile, El Salvador, Malta, and Nicaragua, although in 2006 the Chilean government began the free distribution of emergency contraception.

The Catholic Church since the eighteenth century has maintained that life begins at conception, and therefore intentional abortion is the willful taking of a life.

An eighth-century Sanskrit text instructs women wishing to induce an abortion to sit over a pot of steam or stewed onions.

Where and when access to safe abortion has been barred, due to explicit sanctions or general unavailability, women seeking to terminate their pregnancies have sometimes resorted to unsafe methods.

The United States Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade upheld the fundamental right of a woman to determine whether to continue her pregnancy, deeming legislation that overly restricted abortion as unconstitutional.

Statues of the new type of Hermes stood at stadiums and gymnasiums throughout Greece.

WHO estimates that 19 million unsafe abortions occur around the world annually and that 68,000 of these result in the woman's death.

More serious are the psychological impacts a woman faces following an abortion.

Aristotle wrote, "he line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.

The Indian government officially banned prenatal sex screening in 1994 and moved to pass a complete ban of sex-selective abortion in 2002.

About 1 percent belong to the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church.

A well-known example of a Victorian-era abortionist was Madame Restell, or Ann Lohman, who over a 40-year period illicitly provided both surgical abortion and abortifacient pills in the northern United States.

The risk or miscarriage is greater in those with a known history of several spontaneous abortions or an induced abortion, those with systemic diseases, and those over age 35.

In 1861, the British Parliament passed the Offences Against the Person Act, which continued to outlaw abortion and served as a model for similar prohibitions in other nations.

Historically, Fundamentalist Protestant denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortion rights.

A spontaneous abortion can also be caused by accidental trauma; intentional trauma to cause miscarriage is considered an induced abortion.

According to this formulation, abortion may be justified if the same justification can be applied to killing a postnatal human.

Not all abortions are deemed to be seriously wrong.

When a fetus is expelled from the womb spontaneously it is called a miscarriage or "spontaneous abortion."

The moral and legal aspects of abortion are subject to intense debate in many parts of the world.

The Hippocratic Oath, the chief statement of medical ethics in Ancient Greece, forbade all doctors from helping to procure an abortion by pessary.

Vacuum devices, first described in medical literature in the 1800s, allowed for the development of suction-aspiration abortion.

Evelyn Fisher wrote of how women living in a mining town in Wales during the 1920s used candles intended for Roman Catholic ceremonies to dilate the cervix in an effort to self-induce abortion.

Physical problems after abortion, though, are relatively small in number and usually the physical recovery occurs quickly and without incident.

Today most fundamentalist churches hold that abortion is a form of infanticide.

Induced abortion, according to anthropologists, can be traced to ancient times.

The Bible has been invoked to support all sides of the abortion controversy.

Over the course of the history, induced abortion has been the source of considerable debate, controversy, and activism.

Opinions regarding abortion may be best described as being a combination of beliefs on its morality, and on the responsibility, ethical scope, and proper extent of governmental authorities in public policy.

The Roman Catholic Church also considers the destruction of any embryo to be equivalent to abortion.

The abortion procedure itself, when carried out under medical supervision, is generally safe although as with any procedure there are inherent potential risks.

Pope Innocent III wrote that when "quickening" occurred, abortion was homicide.

According to Chinese folklore, the legendary Emperor Shennong prescribed the use of mercury to induce abortions nearly 5,000 years ago.

Manual vacuum aspiration, or MVA abortion, consists of removing the fetus or embryo by suction using a manual syringe, while the electric vacuum aspiration or EVA abortion method uses an electric pump.

The risk of spontaneous abortion decreases sharply after the eighth week.

In both public and private debate, arguments presented in favor of or against abortion focus on either the moral permissibility of an induced abortion, or justification of laws permitting or restricting abortion.

Both accidental and deliberate abortions of this kind can be subject to criminal liability in many countries.

Other countries, in which abortion is normally illegal, will allow one to be performed in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the pregnant woman's life or health.

Abortion, along with infanticide, was well known in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

From the twentieth to twenty-third week of gestation, an injection to stop the fetal heart can be used as the first phase of the surgical abortion procedure.

Japanese documents show records of induced abortion from as early as the twelfth century.

By contrast, abortion in Ireland was affected by the addition of an amendment to the Irish Constitution in 1983 by popular referendum, recognizing "the right to life of the unborn."

Complications of unsafe abortion are said to account, globally, for approximately 13 percent of all maternal mortalities.

Abortions have been induced throughout history, using methods that were often unsafe and could result in serious harm or even death to the woman.

A number of complex social and health issues exist in the debate over abortion.

Many early scientific journals devoted to heredity in general were run by eugenicists and featured eugenics articles alongside studies of heredity in nonhuman organisms.

Some argue that abortion is right (or permissible) because it allows a woman her right to control her body.

Both pre- and post-quickening abortions were criminalized by Lord Ellenborough's Act in 1803.

Some argue that abortion is wrong based on a belief that an embryo is an innocent person with a right to live.

In 1920 under Vladimir Lenin the Soviet Union was the first to legalize all abortions, but this was reversed in 1936 by Joseph Stalin in order to increase population growth.

Before the scientific discovery that human development begins at fertilization, English common law allowed abortions to be performed before "quickening," the earliest perception of fetal movement by a woman during pregnancy.

Abortion laws and their enforcement have fluctuated through the various eras.

Other prices which nineteenth-century abortionists are reported to have charged were much more steep.

Before that, abortion was considered a less serious sin.

A hysterotomy abortion, similar to a caesarian section but resulting in a terminated fetus, can also be used at late stages of pregnancy.

The Abortion Act 1967 allowed abortion for limited reasons in the United Kingdom.

Other techniques must be used to induce abortion in the third trimester.

Health education, access to family planning, and improvements in health care during and after abortion have been proposed to address this phenomenon.

The twentieth century saw improvements in abortion technology, increasing its safety, and reducing its side-effects.