I've been spending my afternoon reading about pesticide exposure in mothers and outcomes of their children. One study comes from the Ukraine and I was shocked to read this: "Briefly, of pregnancies occurring in the chosen geographic areas and time windows, 60% were terminated for contraceptive purposes, 67% of the remaining were eligible, and 71% of those eligible participated." This made my EYES POP out of my head. 60% terminated? I figured this had to be a mistype. Then I googled the problem and read this:
'Rectly released preliminary results from the 1999 Ukraine Reproductive Health Survey document an alarming level of abortions among Ukrainian women. Almost 40 percent of all women age 15 to 44 have had at least one abortion, and 18 percent had at least two abortions. Since January 1994 almost half of all the pregnancies that ended were terminated by induced abortions, and there were more abortions reported than live births.'
SHOCKING, isn't it. You'd think there would be better, less-invasive, more safe approaches to avoiding having children. Seems there's a public health problem around fertility issues in the Ukraine. Holy crap.
Friday, April 22, 2005
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3 comments:
A lot of this (or the tolerance of this) appears to be cultural. There's a lack of education that drives a lack of use of other forms of birth control.
Contraception and abortion attitudes and practices of Western Ukraine women
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Results: Of married women, 44% (112/256) would terminate their pregnancy while 56% (144/256) said they would keep their baby. Of unmarried women, 35% (31/88) would abort while 65% (57/88) would keep their baby. A large proportion of married women (82%; 222/271) and unmarried women (70%; 52/74) did not use condoms at all.
Conclusion: These results suggest lack of birth control education and contribution to poor protection from sexually transmitted infections. Higher abortion practices may also play a role in the infertility issues that Ukrainian women currently face.
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Another interesting one...
Oral contraceptives in Ukraine
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Hormone contraceptives were prescribed mainly by obstetricians gynecologists. Many of them demonstrated low professional competence on hormone contraception. Side effects characteristic of the first generation of hormone contraceptives triggered negative attitude to them among obstetricians gynecologists which lingers up to now. The word "hormone' shaped negative attitude among women. There was a wide spread opinion that hormones lead to male-type hair growth, pathological extra weight, breast cancer, various irreversible processes.
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It has been shown that brith rates greatly decline (rates are down to around 1.25 children per woman in Italy) in regions where women are completely free to control their reproductive habits. Some of the best forms of birth control may be education and egalitarian reform.
I passed this post along to a friend of mine who studies topics related to Russian history. Her response...
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Yeah they're having this problem in a lot of the CIS countries. Communist Russia had one of the most relaxed abortion policies in history; there was a list of about 30 different acceptable reasons to have an abortion that you could site when you went to your doctor, including "i don't want the baby," I think, so I'm not sure why they needed the other 29 reasons, but I guess that's not really the point. Anyhow, they're gonna have to start thinking seriously about implementing alternate pre-options for birth control because AIDS is out of control over there, and this is probably part of the reason for that.
Another note on the abortion thing--Russia's population is in decline right now, too. Instead of looking at options like expanding government-subsidised childcare programs to encourage career-minded women to keep their babies (like they're looking into in Germany), the primary response in Russia has been to curtail abortion rights. I think they cut the list of reasons down to 10. It's really a shame.
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