Tendai Franklyn-Brown, Staff Reporter

Gomes ... abortion is and always will be a deeply wrenching, emotional choice for women." - Winston SIll/Freelance photographer

An estimated 20,000-30,000 abortions are carried out in Jamaica annually, according to the head of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of the West Indies (UWI).

However, Dr Horace Fletcher, who is also a practising obstetrician, insisted the poll did not identify whether the circumstances for abortion were social.

During a panel discussion on the reform of Jamaica's abortion laws, hosted at the UWI by the Law Society of the Norman Law School, Fletcher said abortions are very common in Jamaica.

"In fact, up to 94 per cent of them (doctors) said they had, at one time or another, induced abortions at the first trimester," he said.

Fletcher was revealing the results of a poll he had conducted of 52 practising gynaecologists in Kingston.

Dr Carolyn Gomes, executive director of Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), in sharing her own position on the issue, said she had witnessed the death of a young girl who succumbed to septicaemia (blood poisoning), because of an unsafe abortion.

"Abortion is and always will be a deeply wrenching, emotional choice for women," Gomes said. "No woman I have met had an abortion lightly. It is not a choice that I could make in my comfortable middle-class existence. However, my life is not the life of countless thousands of Jamaicans."

According to attorney-at-law Suzanne Folks-Goldson, the current Offences Against the Persons Act requires amendments detailing what exceptions there are for abortion.

Fletcher said: "The law, at the moment, prohibits doctors from doing the procedure or aiding the patient to get the procedure done. As physicians, there are instances where we have to do it and in instances where we can't do it, we refer the patient to someone who can."

Fletcher also said there was need for greater dialogue between the Ministry of Health, gynaecologists and obstetricians during ongoing considerations of proposed amendments to the abortion laws.

tendai.franklyn.brown@gleanerjm.com