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Chilean Maternal Mortality Study Refutes Pro-Abortion Assertions : 1st Mar 10
Preliminary findings by a prominent biomedical researcher who examined the startling decrease in maternal mortality over the past 50 years in Chile, appear to undercut assertions by global abortion lobbyists that countries need liberal abortion laws to reduce maternal death rates.
Dr Elard Koch, an epidemiologist on the faculty of medicine at the University of Chile, says Chile’s promotion of “safe pregnancy” measures such as “prenatal detection” and access to professional birth attendants in a hospital setting are the biggest factors in the drop in maternal mortality. Mothers’ deaths plummeted from 275 per 100,000 live births in 1960 to 18.7 in 2000, the largest reduction in any Latin American country. Because Chile protects unborn children in her laws and constitution, the decline can’t be due to legal abortion. In fact, the study shows, maternal mortality in Chile declined over the last century whether abortion was legal or illegal. Chile strengthened her protections for unborn babies in the late 1980s.
“From 1960 onwards”, Dr Koch reports, “there has been a breakthrough in the public health system and primary care” in Chile, with resources devoted to the development of “highly trained personnel, the construction of many primary health centres and the increase of schooling of the population”. Education appeared to be a primary factor in the country’s improved maternal health. Chile today has a maternal health record similar to those of developed nations.
Statistics from the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) support such conclusions. In all of South America, says WHO, Chile boasts the lowest maternal death rate, whereas Guyana, which liberalised her abortion laws in the mid-1990s, citing concern over maternal deaths, has the highest. C-fam. February 11.
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