Injury to a child due to illegal abortion is viewed as criminal assault. Illegal induced abortion may be performed by a qualified or unqualified person or by the woman herself. Most illegal abortions are carried out by unqualified persons using inefficient methods. Traditional healers, chemists or shopkeepers induce abortions with chemicals, detergents and unsterile sharp objects. Mortality from illegal abortions is high and the incidence of post-abortion infection and other physical damage is significantly greater than that of legally-performed abortions. The most common complications are massive haemorrhaging, perforation of the uterus, laceration, sepsis, tetanus renal failure. These serious conditions require the immediate and skilled medical attention which is often unavailable in poor countries. Those who survive frequently suffer ill-health; in some cases, the damage is permanent or death results.
The need for legal, induced abortions has been expressed differently by the various countries whose laws allow for such action. The most liberal, as for example in Cyprus, permit pregnancy terminations on grounds of demonstrated socio-economic and psychological conditions detrimental to full-term pregnancy and birth, as well as in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape. The more conservative countries consider only medical risk to the mother; however this may include her psychological health and sanity. Rape and grossly malformed foetuses are also considered adequate reasons for legal abortions in some conservative jurisdictions.
Despite provision for legal abortion, in some countries (such as France) where the medical profession may come from a background of strong, professed religious belief, doctors may refuse to perform pregnancy terminations. In other countries also, Church opposition, even where abortion may be technically legal, creates considerable obstacles to making abortion available, for example via publicly supported clinics. Thus the situation, globally, shows that where abortion has been legalized the justification and criteria vary considerably; and in some countries, though criteria may be met and the law considers them legal, abortions may, in practice, be very difficult to obtain. The fact that many countries have not yet even considered the issues involved also indicates the cruel circumstances that unwanted or defective pregnancies impose on women.
30 to 50 percent of the 500,000 maternal deaths that occur annually are due to unsafe abortion and it is estimated that 99% of these deaths occur in developing countries. It is estimated that illegal abortions worldwide kill a woman every three minutes, whilst for every one that dies 30-40 others suffer severe health problems. In Latin America, illegal abortion is now the number one killer of women between the ages of 15 and 39.
Anti-abortion laws in most countries are not strictly enforced and so serve only to deter the most reliable and skilled practitioners. In countries where abortion is illegal, millions of women die each year as a result of severe illness due to backdoor abortions, and babydumping is also a dramatic consequence of refused abortion. The drain on scarce medical resources, the hidden effect on the woman and her family, and the loss of a woman from her home as a mother and a worker, all add up to make illegal abortion one of the most costly and inhuman plagues of the twentieth century.
Women have a right to control their own bodies. Legal abortion is a system of birth control many people find acceptable, more so than permanent drug taking against the possibility of becoming pregnant. No contraceptive method is fail-safe, all require planning. True spontaneity, with both partners able fully to enjoy sex when they wish without the fear of producing an unwanted child, is best achieved by making legal abortion easily available.
Except for strict physical and medical reasons, no abortions should be granted. Human life is sacred, even if conceived in violence. Once the door is opened to this and other psychological arguments for legal abortion, there is no end for the murder of children while in the womb. Wealthy people, finding pregnancy inconvenient, may purchase instant abortion service using the latest technology. This is an abuse of responsible adulthood, and of the powers of the medical profession. It is a crime against the unborn child. The acceptance of such legal abortions with the countless inevitable instances of criminality that it entails, cheapens human life and makes it just another commodity. In addition, it opens the way for the advocates of euthanasia who may argue just as emotionally for termination of the suffering, the dying and the aged, with all the consequent abuses that this entails. That the two concepts are related is seen in the case of modern China where both foetuses and infants (usually female) were murdered in order to keep the population down. In other words, naturalists may consider even population control is sufficient justification for murder; thus legalized abortion may eventually be ordered by the State for population control purposes.