According to the U.N. Population Fund, 190 million women become pregnant each year. Around 50 million choose abortion, but unsafe procedures kill about 680,000 of them each year.
Source

I don’t need to write much – just point you over to Alexandra Lee’s excellent summary and note that the debate has been set for July 14.

While American women are fighting a desperate battle, particularly in South Dakota, to preserve abortion rights, around the world there are many positive signs of increased access to abortion, and support for abortion services.

In Argentina, the situation is currently hideous, but there is now open debate, and a very decent bill to legalise abortion is being considered by parliament.

Australia appears to be moving towards ending an American-style ban on foreign aid to organisations that provide abortion advice.

And in the Australian state of Victoria, there is near certainty that abortion will be taken out of the criminal law, and possibly there will be a move that makes the woman the decision maker throughout the entire pregnancy. “An abortion would only be deemed unlawful if conducted by unqualified people and conducted without the woman’s consent. ”

(And also from Australia, a study that found some 70% of women having abortions were using contraception at the time they fell pregnant. This is something about which there desperately needs to be more education. There’s a myth that contraception, particularly the pill, is some sort of perfect system, and it certainly isn’t.)

And importantly coming up very soon in Britain will be debate about improvements to the abortion law in England, Scotland and Wales, removing the two-doctor rule and allowing midwives and nurses to perform abortions. There’s also some chance of a vote to allow abortion in Northern Ireland, where, due to historical accidents andpolitical cowardice, abortion is totally banned, although given the prevalence of the latter, I’m not hopeful on that score.

(Abortion Rights is asking Britons to lobby their MPs to support the reforms.)

Hysteria about people-trafficking is causing considerable damage to the lives of sex workers in Australia, and around the world.

Women (and some men) do make rational, considered decisions to emigrate for sex work. We might prefer that wasn’t the case, but their adult decisions should be regarded as just that.

And they also decide to stay at home for the work – and this video from Cambodia shows the sort of damage done by attempts to stop them.

What does deserve a great deal more attention, and action, is the use of rape as a weapon of war, and the good news of the week is that the UN may finally be beginning to take this seriously.

The release of an official report on the effects of decriminalisation of prostitution in New Zealand has confirmed that it has had the expected positive effects (although of course it is by no means a panacea).

The number of sex workers has not increased, and workers reported that they knew about their rights, felt more able to say “no” to acts they did not want to perform, and that there had been some improvement in protection from violence.

The report was based on studies by the Christchurch School of Medicine and Victoria University’s Crime and Justice Research Centre, and the committee chaired by a former assistance police commissioner, so it would have to be, I’d suggest, treated with respect. (Although experience suggests that it won’t be.)

The government release on the subject adds:

The report shatters several myths with the following findings:
• Coercion is not widespread.
• Sex workers are more likely to be the victims of crime, rather than offenders.
• The links between crime and prostitution are tenuous and the report found no evidence of a specific link between them. The link between under-aged prostitutes and youth gangs is often a case of underage people hanging around with friends who happen to be in youth gangs.
• The reasons people joined and stayed in the sex industry are complex, however money was the main reason.
• Fewer than 17 per cent said they are working to support drug or alcohol use, although when broken down by sector street-based sex workers are more likely to report needing to pay for drugs or alcohol (45 per cent).
• The perceived scale of a ‘problem’ in a community can be directly linked to the amount and tone of media coverage it gets.
• Much of the reporting on the numbers of sex workers and underage involvement in prostitution has been exaggerated.
• There is no link in New Zealand between the sex industry and human trafficking.

The complete report can be found here.

Oddly, despite regular excited coverage about the “Swedish model” of criminalising the clients of prostitutes (of which the government there has refused any serious academic scrutiny whatsoever), there’s been no media coverage of this outside New Zealand that Google News can locate. There’s not even been much coverage in New Zealand – although perhaps that reflects the fact the decriminalisation has been widely accepted in the country.