International Handbook On Abortion

Features

Description

This handbook discusses 33 nations in terms of abortion's legal status, development of the policy, availability of contraception and abortion services, abortion rates, fertility trends, and the demographic/socioeconomic profiles of affected women. The amount of data consolidated in one volume is prodigious, providing information not readily available in any other single source...In terms of policies and data, the book is excellent.

Library Journal This unique work assembles in a single volume data from several continents on the general pattern of legal activity pertaining to abortion, as well as service delivery, the incidence of abortion, and the profile of aborting women. Each of the thirty-three essays in the Handbook surveys in depth the historical development of abortion policy; the role of the medical profession, news media, religious and women's organizations, and other groups in legislative enactments; and demographic data concerning women who seek abortions.

Also dealt with are the relation between abortion, fertility behavior, and family planning policy and programs; the incidence of, complications from, and morbidity as a result of illegal abortions; and abortion research. Review: ?A reference book in format, this Handbook offers detailed and sometimes surprising information; chapters on Belgium, Bangladesh, China, Poland, and Quebec are particularly interesting.

Some patterns of abortion evident in the US are common worldwide: liberalization of the law; differential acceptance of hard' and soft' indications for abortion; replacement of illegal by legal abortions and of abortion by contraception; intrasocietal ethnic/racial variation in abortion utilization; an increasing proportion of abortions to single women; and an increase in repeat abortions as the population at risk increases.

Where conservative resistance exists, it is expressed in a number of ways: pro-life' movements to limit abortion; retention of unenforced prohibitions; reliance on menstral regulation' rather than abortion.' A few nations continue to effectively criminalize abortion. Those cases are instructive, given the possible overturning of the American Roe v.

Wade decision. Sachdev's introductory essay provides an excellent overview. Chapters include information on history, legal status, numbers of legal and illegal abortions, demographics, repeat abortions; attitudes, research, population programs, contraceptive use, and fertility. Data tables are appended. . . .

This is a premier resource that ought to be in every library.?-Choice