Abortion will stay possible in Turkey

ISTANBUL – After national and international pressure, the Turkish government has decided not to introduce a de facto ban on abortion, as had been earlier announced. Turkish media report that on Friday.

Prime Minister Erdogan caused uproar at the end of May when he compared abortion to murder. Soon afterwards the information leaked out that the legal term in which abortion would be possible would be reduced from ten to four weeks. That would mean a de facto ban: in the first four weeks, women are not yet aware that they are pregnant.

In Turkey both women and men took to the streets to defend the right to abortion, and disapproving reactions also started coming in from abroad. Banning abortion, it was said, would lead to unsafe abortions, causing many fatalities among women.

The Minister of Health Akdag announced that the government was considering making contraception more widely available.. The abortion law will be slightly altered: abortions can only be carried out in a general hospital by a specialist doctor.