Number of abortions starting to dip

NEW DELHI, SEPT 19
The number of abortions carried out in India (officially known as medical termination of pregnancy or MTP) has started to dip. In 2008, Goa, with 930 MTPs, was among the States and Union territories with the lowest abortion figures, along with Nagaland (670), Arunachal Pradesh (655), Mizoram (524), Meghalaya (344), the Andaman & Nicobar Islands (94) and Daman & Diu (42).
In 2008, India saw 6.41 lakh abortions across 12,510 institutions, according to ‘Family welfare statistics in India, 2009’, brought out by the Union Health Ministry. This compares with 7.25 lakh MTPs in 2005, 7.21 lakh in 2006 and 6.82 lakh abortions in 2007. The trend is consistently downwards.
In 2008, Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number of MTPs (89,194), followed by Tamil Nadu (63,875), Orissa (59,945), Assam (58,409), Maharashtra (54,545), West Bengal (46,753), Haryana (31,126), Delhi (30,846), Rajasthan (29,292), Gujarat (27,837), Bihar (24,149), Madhya Pradesh (19,385), Karnataka (17,500), Punjab (14,834) and Kerala (14,227).
However, a recent international report by the United States-based Guttmacher Institute called ‘Abortion worldwide: A decade of uneven progress’ said that only two in five of the estimated 6.4 million abortions that take place annually in India are safe. These figures are unsupported by any evidence, but they are at sharp contrast with those of the government.
According to the report, South-East Asia recorded the highest abortion rate in 2003 – 39 per 1,000 (23 per 1,000 unsafe and 16 per 1,000 safe). The majority of abortions were in eastern Asia (10 million, which includes China) and in south central Asia (9.6 million, which includes India). Of the 26 million abortions performed worldwide in 2003, about 16 million were safe and 10 million unsafe procedures, the report said.