Do You Know Where 97% of Abortions Happen?

There’s nothing quite like experiencing the birth of a child. You have no idea,” my wife would say, and she’s right. After years of struggling with infertility, my wife and I finally welcomed a little baby boy into our family. He’s three now and has a little sister who was born last year. We’re getting used to a new routine, but we’re grateful for so many reasons, particularly because the more I look out at the world, the more that I see that safe delivery and medical attention is not the norm for many women.

Safe deliveries don’t happen everywhere. Nearly a year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine and set off Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. Hard to imagine, but life doesn’t stop just because a war started. So try to imagine expecting a baby during this unexpected war. You’ve lost your home. You’re fleeing to safety. Your husband had to stay behind to fight, or maybe he’s already perished. What do you do? For some women, there weren’t many options. Early in the war, heartbreaking images showed the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, where at least one mother and her baby died.

Thankfully, over the last year, pro-life groups in Europe have been helping Ukrainian women and children in lots of practical ways. But some are facing criticism from pro-abortion groups that claim that what women really need right now is access to abortion. This conflict is just one part of a bigger global picture, and it’s a picture that you might not see if you just look at national headlines. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, it was understandably one of the biggest news stories of the year and certainly something to be celebrated. But while nearly a million abortions happen in America each year, an estimated 73 million happen worldwide. In fact, somewhere around 97% of abortions every year happen outside of North America. As believers, I think we need to ask ourselves, how much attention are we paying to those lives?

The Unborn Who Go Unseen

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, it was a massive moment after nearly 50 years of legalized abortion in America. The court ruling called Dobbs v. Jackson said that the U.S. Constitution does not confer the right to an abortion, and it gave individual states the right to determine their own abortion laws. This is really good news. But with so much attention on the U.S., it could be easy to lose sight of what is happening in other places around the world. For example, in the last two years, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia have legalized or decriminalized abortion, and what’s become known as the Green Wave in Latin America. That wave follows dozens of nations that have liberalized their abortion laws over the last two decades. Some think Chile could be next. This has been deeply disappointing to pro-lifers in these countries, but it’s also worth remembering there are six countries in Latin America and the Caribbean where abortion remains illegal. And in other parts of the world, some countries are starting to realize huge consequences of not protecting life.

Tragically, sex-selective abortions have resulted in at least 45 million missing girls over the last 40 years, mostly from abortions in China and India. That number could actually be much higher. One documentary maker said that the three deadliest words in the world are: It’s a girl. And this has created a huge gender imbalance that has led to other tragedies like sex trafficking and even the selling of women and girls, because when a country has millions more men than women, some men grow desperate and turn to evil ways of finding a woman. It’s also led to other kinds of population crises. In 2020, China’s census reported the country’s slowest population growth in decades.

There’s a lot going on here, so I reached out to someone who could help us understand more about women’s health care on a global level. Valerie Huber is president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Health. She also helped craft the Geneva Consensus Declaration. That’s an international declaration that affirms there’s no such thing as an international right to abortion. 35 countries signed this agreement in 2020, including the U.S.

Valerie Huber: We learned that women’s health was being co-opted by radical agendas, mostly a pressure to liberalize abortion or to define women’s health through the lens of abortion, which is crazy. We also found that pro-life and pro-family countries were being pressured to change their laws under the guise of women’s health.

That kind of pressure can be really difficult for a country that needs outside help. They might have to choose between taking foreign assistance that they need or maintaining the pro-life convictions that they hold.

Valerie Huber: And then they have not only weakened their ability to stand for those values in the future, but it has weakened their own sovereignty as a result. I really believe that the Geneva Consensus Declaration can be a fix to those sorts of problems, because it’s easy to intimidate a single country, it’s much more difficult to do so when they’re all standing together.

Eight days after President Joe Biden came into office, he withdrew the U.S. from the Geneva Consensus. He also rescinded the Mexico City policy, which says USAID cannot go to organizations overseas that promote or provide abortions. That policy has been activated and deactivated for nearly 40 years, depending on who is in office. Some claim that’s not a big deal because of the Helms Amendment, which says USAID can’t be used to pay for abortions. That’s a good rule. But without the Mexico City policy, USAID still assists groups that are promoting or providing abortions overseas, even if the money isn’t paying directly for abortions.

Valerie Huber: I think that most Americans, speaking as an American, whether they are pro-life or pro-abortion, if they knew their taxpayer dollars were being used to export ideology under the guise of helping women, they would be opposed to that. And there’s an annual survey every year that’s done in the United States asking Americans if they think that federal funds should be used to export abortion, and the majority of Americans say no, including the majority of those who say they are pro-abortion. This is something that is continuing because most Americans don’t know what’s happening, and it needs to stop.

So what is actually helpful? What does good maternal health care look like apart from an abortion agenda?

Valerie Huber: Well, that means that a woman who is giving birth doesn’t hemorrhage to death because there isn’t a clinic close by or because there isn’t trained modern facilities and healthcare professionals there in an emergency. For a very young infant girl, it means ensuring that there’s adequate nutrition, especially in those first thousand days of life, which begins at conception through age two, so that severe malnutrition doesn’t set them up for problems for the rest of their lives. It looks different from country to country, but there are some common threads there, and it’s not rocket science. Most of these are preventable, and those that aren’t are treatable and often curable. If we really say we care about people, both here in this world and for eternity, then we need to show it, and we can’t show it if we don’t know.

We do need to know more. And getting informed means we need to talk to the people who are in the trenches doing the work, helping women and children in some really tough places in other parts of the world. So Jamie Dean is a friend of mine, and she’s a contributor to Radical, and she did just that.

Jamie Dean: Ellen, I first wanted to ask you how to pronounce your last name. I want to make sure I have that right.

Ellen Foell: Well, that is the most important question. It’s Foell like I fell and hurt myself.

Jamie Dean: Okay.

Heartbeat is an organization that works with a network of life-affirming organizations around the world, including pregnancy help centers, pregnancy medical centers, nonprofit adoption agencies, and maternity homes. Over the last year, Ms. Foell spent time in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, where she saw firsthand what expected mothers were facing and how pro-life workers were helping.

Ellen Foell: Sometimes in a war, what is taken away? Sometimes a home language, literature, music, professions, husbands, as they go to war, sons, as they go to war, family life. Things are stripped away, and the role that we can play in restoring a woman’s dignity is great, and it is challenging.

In practical ways, that has looked like responding in real-time with real help. Ms. Foell talked about meeting pro-life workers who were digging in.

Ellen Foell: It was such a privilege to rub shoulders and have conversations with people who were in the pregnancy help movement, but they were doing so much more, so much more in terms of reaching women, their families, literally seeing babies born in bomb shelters, opening their homes to displaced Ukrainians. Heartbeat has several affiliates in the Ukraine. We have the Pregnancy Assistance Center in Kharkov, which as you know, lost a lot, a lot of people during the war because of the heavy bombing.

One team of workers even started a pro-life center in Lviv after the war started.

Ellen Foell: Who takes the initiative to start and launch a pregnancy help center during a war? Well, the people of God. So that center has already served women, they have had babies born, they have provided resources.

But the work isn’t just limited to one part of the world.

Ellen Foell: That is the beauty of the pregnancy help movement and, frankly, of God’s love. It spans the globe. It crosses religions or lack of religion. It crosses ethnicities. It crosses every barrier and restriction and boundary that human beings set up. That is the beauty of it. Why? Because there are women in unexpected pregnancies across ethnicities, across faiths, across religions, across lack of religions, across geopolitical borders struggling with a physical life that’s inside them, to know that there is life, abundant, life eternal, and life for that child that is possible, and life for the mom.

It can be discouraging to see some countries liberalizing their abortion laws when the need to bring life to these places is so great. Remember, we’re talking about 97%, but to be honest, have gone unseen in my own life, and I just wonder how many Christians say they care, but like me, remain unaware of the need. Maybe a next step can be as simple as praying daily, following international headlines, or seeking out international pro-life efforts where you can get involved. There’s a lot to do, but there are also a lot of reasons to be hopeful. Pregnancy centers are popping up during wars, unborn lives are being saved, and there is hope for how pro-lifers can respond.

Ellen Foell: You watch there and what you may very well see in tandem is the pregnancy help movement rising.

Jamie Dean: So the call of the church is to be ready to go, it sounds like.

Ellen Foell: Yes. Yes. Thank you so much. That is it. We are called to be ready. This is like this hurricane lamp on my hearth, I think that mantle, mantle, and I have also a bottle of kerosene as a reminder to myself I don’t want to be caught without oil. We are called to be the five bridesmaids who not only brought their lamps but brought extra oil, because when the call comes, He’s here, He’s here, He’s come. We need to be ready. So yes, absolutely, Jamie, the call to the church is be ready. Be ready. We have a call to speak life across the globe, and what an honor.