 | | An activist in Krakow, Poland, in April protesting an effort to tighten the country’s abortion rules.Agencja Gazeta, via Reuters |
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“Women and girls should not be shoved to the end of the line.” |
— Dr. Natalia Kanem, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund |
When a 19-year-old woman from southern Poland decided to end her pregnancy at 18 weeks, she knew the only way for her to get an abortion was to rush to a nearby European country. |
Abortion is illegal in most circumstances in Poland, and so for years, many women have traveled within Europe to seek the procedure. |
But it was April, and across the continent, borders were closing fast because of the coronavirus pandemic. So she and a friend loaded up their Renault with instant noodles and candy for a 14-hour race to Utrecht, in the Netherlands. They made it just in time for her to have the procedure and return home, her friend said. |
Across the Atlantic, a 31-year-old woman had set off on a similar journey in March to end her pregnancy at about three weeks. She drove from Arkansas — where in the last few years access to abortion has become more restricted — to Oklahoma City for a scheduled procedure. |
But the same day this woman got to Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt issued an executive order suspending abortions there. The woman then had to drive to another city in another state, Wichita, Kan., before she was able to finally terminate her pregnancy. |
The two women’s journeys, Ping-Ponging across borders amid a pandemic to get an abortion, reflect how, around the world, the virus has added another obstacle to an already complicated and time-sensitive procedure. |
From the outset of the coronavirus outbreak, advocacy groups and the United Nations warned that women’s access to reproductive services could be imperiled and that disruptions to access would have alarming outcomes. |
In April, the United Nations’ sexual and reproductive health agency estimated that there could be seven million unintended pregnancies around the world — potentially increasing the demand for abortions — if lockdowns continued for at least six months and there were disruptions to reproductive services. |
“As a corollary, unsafe abortions will increase,” Natalia Kanem, executive director of the agency, the United Nations Population Fund, said in April. |
Earlier this month, the World Health Organization reiterated the need for governments to maintain access to safe reproductive services. |
“Even a 10 percent reduction in these services could result in an estimated 15 million unintended pregnancies, 3.3 million unsafe abortions and 29,000 additional maternal deaths during the next 12 months,” the organization stated in a recent report. |
In Europe, the pandemic’s interruption of abortion procedures seemed largely the byproduct of a hurried and frantic response to a public health crisis. |
Closing borders made it harder for women in countries with strict abortion regulations, like Poland, to seek the procedure elsewhere. |
Under normal circumstances, women in these countries can get an abortion during the first half of a pregnancy. But not including abortions on the essential procedures list meant that hospitals and clinics were free to turn women away. And some did, although they have now reopened or will this month. |
Governments in Germany, Austria, Romania, Croatia and Slovakia, trying to tackle the health care demands of the pandemic, did not label abortions as essential, time-sensitive procedures. In at least four German states, a few clinics and hospitals stopped offering the procedure for some time — saying in some cases that they were focusing exclusively on virus cases, and in others that they had shut down entirely. In Niederbayern, a district in the state of Bavaria, the only doctor who performed abortions was older than 70, and in a risk category himself. He stopped going to work, making access to the service harder in the already underserved rural area. |
For a time, the continent had “a combination of factors coinciding: Hospital care is restricted, doctors are shutting down services, states are not classifying abortions as an essential service,” said Leah Hoctor, the Europe director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group. |
In the U.S., where the debate over abortion is heavily politicized, disruptions to services were more deliberate. |
Anti-abortion governors in Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Alabama listed abortions as “nonessential” procedures, arguing that performing them would threaten supplies of medical resources and protective equipment in the middle of the pandemic. |
“I firmly believe that this is a coordinated movement among the anti-abortion folks,” said Julie Burkhart, founder and chief executive of Trust Women, which operates a clinic in Oklahoma City and another in Wichita, Kan. She noted that even before the pandemic, states that deemed abortion nonessential were debating legislation to curb access. |
Her clinics, she said, saw a surge in the number of women seeking abortions, many of them coming from other states. “We saw, in one week, over 250 patients,” she said, compared with the usual 40 patients per week per clinic. |
But the pandemic also cracked open an unexpected window in a small number of places in Europe: France, Ireland, and England, Scotland and Wales in Britain all loosened restrictions and permitted at-home abortions with medication administered by prescription and the guidance of a medical professional over the phone or online. |
Before the pandemic, medical abortions in these countries were permitted only after an in-person consultation with a doctor, and the medication had to be taken in a clinic, not at home. |
The authorities in Britain said allowing at-home medical abortions with remote guidance was a temporary measure. But Ms. Hoctor said she hoped the countries that permitted the procedure would not go back to restricting it. |
At-home abortions “represent women-centered, evidence-based policy changes,” Ms. Hoctor said. “The fact that these laws and policies were changed quickly in order to respond to the pandemic demonstrates that it is possible to modernize European countries’ abortion laws.” |
Dr. Kanem, of the United Nations agency, said the two strikingly different approaches — in the United States, where the debate over abortion was highly polarized, and in Europe, where governments failed to make women’s health needs a priority — can both lead “to terrible outcomes.” |
“Women and girls should not be shoved to the end of the line,” she said. |
Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | A playground in Melbourne.Christina Simons for The New York Times |
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- “Policy needs to catch up with what women are doing.” Australia is pouring millions into the male-dominated construction industry while ending free child care, a move that critics say reflects sexist biases. [Read the story]
- “Based on a racial stereotype.” Quaker Oats, the owner of Aunt Jemima, the 131-year-old pancake-mix and syrup brand, said on Wednesday that it would drop the name and change the packaging of the brand, which the company acknowledged was built on racist imagery. [Read the story]
- “I am hearing from kids about things that happened to them at school that they never had the words for.” Several middle-grade books — typically geared toward children from 8 to 12 — published over the past year address sexual consent, abuse and harassment, subjects previously considered off-limits for such young readers. [Read the story]
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Correction: An earlier newsletter from March misrepresented the data on domestic violence cases in the U.S. in 2018. Domestic violence made up about 20 percent of all violent crimes, not half of all serious violent crimes. |
Today’s In Her Words was written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Monika Pronczuk. It was edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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