LISBON, Portugal (AP) -- Portugal's parliament voted overwhelmingly to legalize abortion up until the 10th week of pregnancy, a major step in bringing this small Roman Catholic nation in line with most of its European neighbors.

The Thursday night vote came less than a month after a popular referendum failed due to low turnout, but nonetheless showed that most voters were in favor of legalizing abortion -- in line with the trend across Europe.

By European standards, the new law is still on the restrictive side. Women can seek abortions up to the 24th week of pregnancy in Britain and up to the 12th week in Germany, France and Italy. In the United States, a 1973 Supreme Court ruling established the right to abortion, although individual states have passed laws with varying restrictions.

''This (parliamentary) vote is a turning point in Portugal's history. It's a law that ... defends women's dignity,'' Ricardo Rodrigues, a senior legislator from the ruling Socialist party, said Friday.

He added that the government hopes decriminalizing abortion will put an end to dangerous backstreet abortions. Women's rights groups say about 10,000 women are hospitalized every year in Portugal with complications arising from botched, illegal abortions.

Portugal, a dictatorship until 1974, has gradually opened up and liberalized during 20 years of membership in the European Union, pushing much of its legislation into closer line with the continent's older democracies.

Prime Minister Jose Socrates, whose party took power in a landslide victory nearly two years ago after he promised broad reforms and national modernization, had made the new abortion law a priority. He vowed after the failed referendum to move quickly for legislative passage, and has described the old abortion law as ''backward.''

The old law was among the most restrictive in Europe, allowing the procedure in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy only if a mother's health was at risk. In cases of rape, it was permitted through the 16th week. There was no time restriction only if an abortion was the only way to save a pregnant women's life.

The new law will set no restrictions on women seeking to end their pregnancies up until the 10th week, though it does require a mandatory three-day reflection period before an abortion will be performed.

It separates Portugal from the three EU countries with the most restrictive abortion laws -- Poland, Ireland and Malta.

The bill must win presidential ratification and be published in official government records before it can become law. That process is expected to take several months.

The abortion debate pitted Socrates' government against conservatives and members of the Roman Catholic Church.

Before the February referendum, one bishop said abortion was ''a variation on the death sentence,'' and compared it to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. An outspoken parish priest warned worshippers that they would be excommunicated if they voted ''yes.''

Church officials had no immediate reaction to Thursday's vote.

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MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Jazmina Bojorge arrived at Managua's Fernando Vélez Paiz Hospital on a Tuesday evening, nearly five months pregnant and racked with fever and abdominal pain. By the following Thursday morning, both the pretty 18-year-old and the female fetus in her womb were dead.

The mystery of what happened during the intervening 36 hours might not ordinarily have catapulted Bojorge into the headlines of a nation with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere.

But a week before her death on Nov. 2, Nicaragua's legislature had voted to ban all abortions, eliminating long-standing exceptions for rape, malformation of the fetus and risk to the life or health of the mother. Now, outraged opponents of the legislation have declared Bojorge its first victim.

"It's clear that fear of punishment kept the doctors from doing what they needed to do to save her -- which was to abort the pregnancy immediately," said Juanita Jiménez of the Women's Autonomous Movement, an advocacy group that is leading the campaign to reverse the ban. "This is exactly what we warned would happen if this law was passed. We've been taken back to the Middle Ages."

Julio César Flores, director of the hospital, countered that the new legislation, which took effect Nov. 19, hadn't even been signed into law when Bojorge arrived for treatment. Her death, which remains under investigation by Nicaraguan medical authorities, "has nothing to do with the abortion law," he said. "These charges are being made by people who are taking advantage of what happened."

The controversy is the latest twist in a debate over the proper limits on abortion that is raging not just in Nicaragua but across Latin America.

With the exception of Cuba, every nation in this predominantly Catholic region either totally prohibits abortion or limits it to extreme circumstances. And while the global trend over the past decade has been to liberalize abortion laws, efforts to do so in Latin America have been met by an equally determined campaign to strengthen them further.

So far, the anti-abortion camp's greatest triumph has been in El Salvador, where in 1998, at the public urging of San Salvador's Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle, lawmakers removed all exceptions to the nation's ban on abortion and increased penalties to up to 50 years' imprisonment.

Here in Nicaragua, the church has also long played an influential role in politics. Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who is retired but remains a public figure, is still respected by many for standing up to both U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza during the 1970s and Daniel Ortega, the Marxist-leaning revolutionary who replaced him in the 1980s.

Soon after El Salvador passed its new law, Obando and his successor, Archbishop Leopoldo Brenes, turned their attention to pressing for a similar measure in Nicaragua.

Abortion had been illegal in Nicaragua for more than a century, punishable by prison terms of up to four years for women undergoing the procedure and 10 years for doctors who performed it.

However, the penal code made an exception for "therapeutic abortion" if three doctors determined it was needed. According to Health Ministry regulations, this covered abortions of pregnancies lasting 20 weeks or less that posed a threat to the life or health of the mother or in which the fetus was malformed. In practice, rape victims were also permitted legal abortions.

Advocates for greater access to abortion argued that even that law was too restrictive, prompting an estimated 32,500 women to get illegal and potentially unsafe abortions in Nicaragua every year and accounting for 16 percent of the more than 100 maternal deaths here annually, according to a 2002 ministry study. By contrast, the Health Ministry recorded only six legal abortions in Nicaragua last year.

But church leaders and other anti-abortion activists in Nicaragua contended that the number of legal abortions in Nicaragua was far higher, reaching about 1,000 a year.

"This idea of 'therapeutic abortion' was being abused," said Brenes, the archbishop. "People were easily getting doctors to say that the abortion was being done to save the mother's life, when in reality it was a person who just said, 'I don't want this child.' "

Nicaragua's tight presidential election this month offered Nicaragua's anti-abortion movement the opening it had been waiting for: With Ortega's conservative opposition evenly divided between two challengers, none of the top three candidates could afford to alienate the church.

On Oct. 6, Obando, Brenes and various evangelical pastors led tens of thousands of citizens in a march to the National Assembly to demand a repeal of the exception for therapeutic abortions. Legislators obliged, fast-tracking consideration of the ban under procedures normally reserved for national emergencies.

Every major medical society in Nicaragua opposed the proposed ban. Their concerns were echoed by Nicaragua's health minister and a long list of foreign embassies and international organizations such as the U.N. Development Program.

"But the legislators wouldn't even meet with us," said Carmen Solórzano, a leading member of Nicaragua's Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "I'm indignant that in a state that is supposedly secular, the church has so much influence while the government won't even listen to doctors."

The Rev. Rolando Álvarez, spokesman for the Managua archdiocese, said that although church leaders oppose abortions in the case of rape or a malformed fetus, they intend to urge lawmakers to clarify that the elimination of therapeutic abortion should not prevent doctors from saving a woman's life when her pregnancy puts her in mortal danger.

Women's rights groups and medical associations, meanwhile, are preparing to petition Nicaragua's highest court to declare the ban unconstitutional. That approach met with success last May in Colombia, which, like El Salvador, had a blanket prohibition on abortions.

Failing that, activists who oppose the ban say they will take their case to an international body such the U.N. Human Rights Committee or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -- with Bojorge's relatives the likely plaintiffs.

According to Flores, the hospital director, although Bojorge showed signs of vaginal bleeding and uterine contractions on her arrival at the hospital, doctors decided to give her medication to stave off the contractions because an ultrasound indicated that her fetus was alive. The next day, another test indicated that the fetus had died, and Bojorge was taken off the medication to allow her body to expel the dead fetus naturally. Instead, she went into shock, possibly because the placenta had detached, causing massive blood loss.

Flores contends that the doctors' decision to prevent Bojorge from delivering while the fetus was still alive was routine. Jiménez, of the Women's Autonomous Movement, argues that it was an extremely risky undertaking for a hospital that lacked ready access to ultrasound equipment. (The hospital's equipment is broken, forcing doctors to transport patients to a separate facility for scans.)

"In this sort of situation, the safe thing to do is to just abort the fetus," Jiménez said. "It's obvious that the doctors were paralyzed by the new law."

Bojorge's relatives, meanwhile, are not sure what to think. "No one at the hospital ever told us what was going on," her mother, Rosa Rodriguez, 44, said sadly during an interview in front of the tidy tin shack where Bojorge lived with her husband and 4-year-old son.

Rodriguez and Bojorge's husband, Marvin Savala, a 24-year-old construction worker, had not even heard of the charge that the new abortion legislation may have played a role in Bojorge's death.

But as he contemplated that possibility, Savala's eyes darkened.

"If that's the case, then the doctors were very wrong," he said. "They should have done whatever it took to save my wife. Now I've lost not just our baby, but my whole family."

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Abortion has been illegal in Nicaragua for more than a century, and most women who decide to end unwanted pregnancies seek procedures at underground clinics. But the new law strikes out a clause that made it possible for a woman to obtain an abortion legally when three doctors certified that unless she did, her own life would be in danger.

For months, the proposed law has drawn fierce criticism from several local women’s groups, the country’s association of gynecologists, the United Nations, the World Health Organization and Human Rights Watch, among others.

“This is a throwback to the Middle Ages for women’s rights,” Juana Jiménez, the leader of the Women’s Autonomous Movement in Nicaragua, said after the law was passed.

The law was the fruit of the recent presidential election, as conservatives saw a chance to gain its passage in Parliament during the election season.

The country is 85 percent Roman Catholic, with most other voters belonging to conservative evangelical churches. Four of the five presidential candidates supported it.

Daniel Ortega, the former Marxist who was president from 1985 to 1990 and the leader of the Sandinista Party, abandoned his ideological roots and supported passage of the law in an effort to gain support from the Roman Catholic Church in his campaign to regain the presidency. He narrowly won the election, on Nov. 5, with about 38 percent of the vote.

The support of the Sandinistas in the National Assembly was critical, because they had blocked similar measures in the past. The bill passed on Oct. 26.

Some opponents to the law had hoped Mr. Bolaños, a conservative, would not sign the bill because it did not include the stiffer sentences he had wanted for women who had had illegal abortions, or for those who had performed abortions. The six-year prison term remains unchanged under the law. The president had asked for a 30-year prison term.

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KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 6, 2006): Unsafe abortion is a serious health problem for women around the world, according to a World Report on Women's Health released by the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (Figo).

Figo president Dorothy Shaw said 13% of all maternal deaths globally were caused by unsafe abortions annually, adding that it was a much higher percentage in many developing countries.

"Almost anywhere in the world, a woman with resources can obtain a safe termination of an unwanted pregnancy, regardless of the law. On the other hand, a woman without resources often finds that a safe procedure is beyond her means," Shaw said today on the sidelines of the 18th Figo World Congress of Gynaecology and Obstetrics here that will last until Friday (Oct 10, 2006).

"Gender-based violence is another public health problem affecting girls and women in all social strata in all countries," said Shaw, citing prenatal sex selection, neglect of girls, honour and dowry-related violence, trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation, female genital mutilation or cutting, and violence against women in situations of armed conflict.

Shaw said there were serious health consequences for women, including adverse outcomes of pregnancy.

"Costs to the health care system are enormous, estimated at 3.3% of Gross Domestic Product in the US and US$40.2 billion in England and Wales."

Shaw added that recent information showed that almost 50% of sexual assaults occur in girls under the age of 15 and this may be a factor in the increase in HIV prevalence among young women between 15 and 24, who now account for the majority of HIV-positive young people.

"Public awareness is the first step in addressing these gross violations of the human rights of women and girls," said Shaw.

Unsafe abortion, fistula, violence against women and the tragic increase in HIV in young women are a few of the 22 areas of concern detailed in the report.

Shaw said obstetric fistula - a hole that develops usually between the vagina and bladder, and sometimes the rectum due to prolonged, obstructed labour - is a tragedy affecting an estimated two million women in Africa and Asia.

She said partnerships among international health care agencies have resulted in an increase in surgical repair, but prevention of obstetric fistula requires broader action to improve maternal health.


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The Global Gag Rule requires nongovernmental organizations to agree as a condition of their receipt of Federal funds that such organizations would neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations. This restriction prevents overseas health organizations who receive U.S. family planning funding from discussing the abortion option. Under the policy, organizations can not receive funding if they provide abortion services, counsel patients on abortion options, refer patients for abortion services, or lobby their governments to legalize abortion.

Specifically, this order prohibits the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from distributing family planning funding to all foreign non-governmental organizations unless the organization agrees not to direct any money—including funds raised separately from the United States government—towards abortion services and advocacy, as well as abortion counseling services.

What is the history of the Global Gag Rule?

The Global Gag Rule—also known as the Mexico City Policy—originated from an executive order in 1984, under the leadership of the Reagan Administration and continued throughout the first Bush Administration. After initially overturning the restrictions by executive order in 1993, President Clinton accepted a modified version of the Rule in 1999 as a condition of passage of a funding bill releasing U.S. funds to the United Nations. On the first day of his administration, January 22, 2001, President Bush issued an executive order reinstating and extending the Global Gag Rule so that it further restricted counseling services. This policy remains in effect today.

Does the Global Gag Rule prevent abortions abroad?

A large misconception about the Global Gag Rule is that it prevents United States funding of abortions abroad. In reality, it has been illegal to use U.S. money in this way since 1974. The Rule primarily restricts information, rather than abortions.

What are the dangers of maintaining the Global Gag Rule internationally?

The last time the Global Gag Rule was in effect, there was not a reduction in the number of abortions. Rather, there was a reduction in access to health care, and an increase in unintended pregnancy and abortions. By denying funds to groups that counsel women on abortion (like International Planned Parenthood Federation), the rule lessens the dissemination of family planning and pregnancy prevention information. The most effective method to prevent abortion is to prevent pregnancy—a goal best accomplished through family planning counseling.

Throughout underdeveloped countries, family planning clinics are desperately in need of supplies, including contraceptives. The Global Gag Rule has curtailed the efforts of pregnancy prevention abroad by depriving organizations of the necessary funding for contraceptives.

Counseling services help reduce maternal illness and death resulting from childbirth. The World Health Organization estimates that close to 600,000 women die each year from pregnancy-related causes. The Global Gag Rule harms efforts to prevent unintended pregnancy, thereby increasing the likelihood of maternal illness and death amongst women.

Most importantly, family planning centers provide disease prevention education to women in underdeveloped countries. By restricting funding overseas, the Global Gag Rule prohibits funding to the crucial international effort to reduce the instances of HIV/AIDS.

What is happening in the U.S. Congress to counter the Global Gag Rule?

Senator Barbara Boxer spearheaded a Senate effort to counter the Global Gag Rule in July 2003. The Boxer Amendment (S.AMDT.1141) amends the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 by overturning the Global Gag Rule. It states that foreign non-governmental organizations cannot be denied funding based on the legal medical services they provide, including counseling.

In the House of Representatives, Representative Nita Lowey has twice attempted to pass the Global Democracy Promotion Act of 2003 (H.R. 2952), which seeks to prohibit the restrictive requirements on foreign nongovernmental agencies. The bill was referred to the House Committee on International Relations. With leadership of the House currently in the hands of anti-choice lawmakers, no action is expected on this measure.

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