Starting today, we’ll be highlighting blogposts from one country very month! Let’s start with Pakistan, where an estimated 890,000 abortions happen every year.

In August 1997, the Commission of Inquiry for Women in Pakistan made a remarkable recommendation:

“A Woman’s right to obtain an abortion by her own choice within the first 120 days of pregnancy should be unambiguously declared an absolute legal right”.

Unfortunately this recommendation has not yet become the law.

The law only permits abortions only to save the life of the mother and if the pregnancy risks her physical and mental wellbeing.  According to a Guttmacher Report on Asia, the non-availability of legal and safe abortion mostly affects poor women, while their richer counterparts are able to obtain illegal but safe services within the country.

In this blog post we bring to you some of our older posts on access to safe abortion in Pakistan, and the work being done by civil societies to increase the access. You will find a full details on Pakistan’s law on our website.

Morality Becomes More Restrictive Than the Law:
Uzma Farooq, an Advocacy Officer for Women’s Health at Shirkat Gah – Women’s Resource Centre in Pakistan explores the connection between the laws regulating abortion, and the actual availability of abortion care. “There are situations where it is legal and yet not provided,” she writes; “and where the laws on the face of it are restrictive yet the reason for refusing abortion may not be due to the law.” Pakistan, she explains, happens to be an example of the latter scenario. Read more.

Abortion, A Human Rights Issue in Pakistan, and Worldwide:
In her second blog for ASAP, Uzma Farooq, an Advocacy Officer for Women’s Health at Shirkat Gah – Women’s Resource Centre in Pakistan, highlights that safe abortions is a human rights issue. Read more.

Medical Abortion Hotlines In Pakistan: An Interview With Peace Foundation:
In the last four years, the Asia Safe Abortion Partnership has worked hard to improve access to medical abortion around Asia. One of our projects is medical abortion hotlines. We partner with regional and global organizations in order to launch and run these hotlines. Currently there are three major hotlines in Asia: In Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand. For September 28, we interviewed one of our partners, Peace Foundation which operates the medical abortion hotline in a few regions of Pakistan. Read More.

Pakistan: Networking Widely for Safe Abortion on Sept. 28:
The recorded burden of unsafe abortion on Maternal Mortality Rate in Pakistan is just 6%. But several post-mortem reports do not clearly reveal if the cause of death was an induced, unsafe abortion or a complicated miscarriage. On September 28 2012, Shirkat Gah took a remarkable step towards alleviating this situation, when they conducted a national networking event and brought together several community-based organizations to discuss the unmet need for safe abortion.Read More.