Rebecca Gibian and Diana Crandall
JAKARTA and YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia — In a country where abortion is illegal and talking about reproductive health is taboo, women are terminating their pregnancies in unsafe ways, often getting hurt and sometimes dying as a result.
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that abortion is about 20 percent more prevalent in Indonesia than in Southeast Asia as a whole. Three out of every 1,000 Indonesian women between the ages of 15 and 44 are hospitalized each year due to complications from botched abortions. While a small group of activists has lobbied to reverse the Dutch colonial restrictions on abortion that are still on the books, popular opinion in this predominantly Muslim country has opposed reform.