New York, NY (LifeNews.com) -- The International Planned Parenthood Federation, one of the largest abortion businesses in the world, has released its annul report about abortions in the Western Hemisphere. The report claims that millions of illegal abortions are done annually in these Latin American and Caribbean nations that prohibit abortion.The report begins with a very telling revealing of the strategy IPPF seeks to employ in the region in over to overturn the pro-life cultural values reflected in the abortion laws there.
"Since political conditions will not change dramatically in the region in the short-term, we must strengthen our advocacy agenda towards abortion law reform so that we don't continue
to hold women hostage in the meantime," IPPF says.
That means the abortion group plans to get its foot in the door in pro-life nations by providing post-abortion care for women who have illegal abortions.
The strategy, IPPF says in the report, also includes promoting anti-HIV programs, promoting contraception and plugging the morning after pill wherever possible. It hopes these less controversial initiatives will pave the way to legalize some or all abortions.
"The first step -- expanding the social base of support towards change -- should come from teams and institutions committed to sexual and reproductive rights," the group explains.
Planned Parenthood makes wild claims about the number of illegal abortions in the region, yet offers no explanation for its figures.
"Highly restrictive laws and the social stigma surrounding abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean leave women with a lack of options, forced into a state of isolation and fear. The region has one of the highest unsafe abortion rates in the world, with approximately 3.8 million illegal abortions performed in dangerous conditions every year," it says.
IPPF says a group called Iniciativas Sanitarias (“Health Initiatives”) based in Uruguay is a key partner" in its effort to stop illegal abortions.
However, Dr. Randy O'Bannon, Education Director for National Right to Life, has said that the number of illegal abortions in developing countries is likely inflated.
"The precision implied in such numbers is highly misleading," O'Bannon says. He adds that such figures "are based on meager data and a lot of assumption-laden extrapolations."
Many of these countries do not maintain detailed birth or mortality records, much less abortion statistics, making even the roughest of estimates problematic," he explained.
WHO also relies on what is calls "public source data" to provide illegal abortion death guesses. Typically, a "public source" is a journal article, report, or unpublished document, often from a pro-abortion organization, raising questions about its objectivity.
O'Bannon says these sources of information are unreliable.
In Uruguay, for example, the WHO relies on studies with samples sizes of 5, 14, and 23 individuals to extrapolate the number of deaths due to illegal abortions for the entire country. In addition, the studies were done in the 1970s and 1980s and are not current.
The data may provide anecdotal evidence of abortion-related deaths but does not validate the claims of thousands of such deaths, O'Bannon concludes.