Safe Abortion Day: Signing is not enough, now let's write to the EU
cristiangcel
- 3 minutes read - 509 wordsToday, September 28, marks the International Day for Safe Abortion: a right that the WHO unequivocally defines as an essential component of the right to health and whose absence violates a series of fundamental human rights.
Last year, with determination and with the goal of improving the conditions of women in the EU, I actively supported and shared – both in real life and digitally – the “My Voice My Choice” campaign for access to safe abortion. This initiative collected over 1.1 million signatures, becoming the fastest-growing EU petition in its history.
Banning safe abortion does not reduce the number of abortions; it only makes them clandestine and deadly. This is an incontrovertible fact, supported by decades of research and reports from the World Health Organization: where abortion is restricted or criminalized, women do not stop seeking it. They are simply forced to risk their lives.
The WHO estimates that every year, worldwide, as many as 39 million women resort to unsafe abortions. Of these, approximately 7 million are forced to endure complications requiring medical care, and tragically, maternal deaths from unsafe abortion are between 22,000 and 31,000 per year.
These are not abstract numbers: they are women, with names, faces, and stories, who die agonizing deaths from sepsis, hemorrhage, and damage to internal organs. They are victims of legislation that, in practice, has sentenced them to death, transforming a routine medical procedure into a potentially lethal act. Ensuring safe abortion is not a matter of ideology, but of public health and survival.
However, today the specter of certain so-called “pro-life” groups – who, with an increasingly radical strategy and with the support of extremist groups within the government, even operate inside family counseling centers to undermine the concrete application of abortion laws – continues to threaten this right, reducing women to mere incubators and violating their right to be free from cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, such as being forced to carry pregnancies resulting from rape or that risk their own lives.
These are the same groups that, all too often, show no real interest for the life of the mother or the child after birth, nor for minors involved in conflicts like the one in Palestine or other international crises (including the victims of the migration phenomenon in the Mediterranean), or for children who suffer abuse and neglect. Their agenda seems primarily focused on controlling women’s bodies, revealing a fanatical and religious vision that reduces women to objects of domination, subjugated to supposed divine rules.
Therefore, if you care about freedom and self-determination, I ask you to join me in sending a formal letter to the European Commission, so that during this crucial phase of analyzing the campaign, pressure is applied for its full affirmation.
We cannot allow the ideology of a few to erase the rights of millions and continue to claim innocent victims all over the world: the stakes are too high.
Send your letter to the EU commission by clicking here