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Notícias
Members of the Parliamentary Assembly
Parliamentary Assembly
April 14th, 2008
We, the undersigned, are writing to urge you to support the resolution on access to safe and
legal abortion in Europe drafted by the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and
Men. As drafted, the resolution clearly addresses three key concerns with regard to the full
enjoyment of the human rights of women in Europe:
- the need to decriminalise abortion everywhere;
- the need to ensure that when women do have abortions, those abortions are safe and
that women also receive quality post-abortion care, consistent with their right to the
highest attainable standard of health; and
- the need to implement health strategies to reduce the number of crisis pregnancies
and therefore abortions through education, access to information, effective access to
contraceptive methods, and foster a climate of equality and informed choice.
As NGOs working in Portugal, we have witnessed the harm caused by laws that deny access
to abortion services in Portugal. On 11 February 2007, the Portuguese people voted in a
referendum to change the law that criminalised abortion, agreeing that women should have
access to this health service. The previous Portuguese law as others that criminalise abortion
are particularly noxious because they are so ineffective, yet have such a profoundly harmful
effect on so many women. According to the data of Ministry of Health (MoH), each year
around 11.000 women were attended in Portuguese Hospitals because of abortion
complications. It was estimated that at least 50% of these complications were due to illegal
abortion - backstreet and self-induced abortions.
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