Medical doctor and anti-abortion advocate, Dr Wayne West, at a meeting at the Missionaries of the Poor in Kingston yesterday, was the loudest proponent of that view.

Using the African-American community as an example, West underscored that since the ruling in the case Roe v Wade in 1973, which made it legal for women to abort a foetus up to 24 weeks old in 33 states in the United States, the freedom to abort has impacted mildly on the social and economic conditions of blacks in that country.

"People say to inner-city women, 'You need to have an abortion'. Twenty years later, how has abortion helped?" argued West.

African Americans most vulnerable

In research data presented by him, West noted that African Americans remained the most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, poverty and crime and violence. This, he said, was despite the arguments of supporters of induced abortion that legalising the act would help to reduce those very same issues.

Blacks accounted for very close to 50 per cent of the new diagnoses of HIV/AIDS in the US in 2005.

Likewise, African Americans remained one of the poorest groups of people in the US, with two-thirds of single-parent-headed households living in poverty.

More than 33 per cent of black American children live in single-parent homes.

African Americans are also still the group most afflicted by crime and violence. Nearly half of the people murdered in America each year are black.

Chairperson of the Violence Prevention Alliance, Dr Elizabeth Ward, however, disagreed with aspects of West's argument, suggesting that there was indeed a public-health issue arising from underground abortion in Jamaica that could be addressed in some way if it were made legal.

Abortions going bad

Drawing on her own years of experience in the medical profession, she noted that many hospitals saw frequent cases of incomplete abortions that have in instances led to maternal death.

Patsy Edwards, a nurse representing the Nurses' Association of Jamaica, provided support for Ward's experience, highlighting that there was in fact a 12-bed ward at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital for women who have had abortions. The ward sees more than 600 patients per month, more than 40 per cent of the patients have had an induced abortion.

But while the two argued that there was a public-health issue that could be addressed by legalising induced abortions, the two agreed that it would not, for the most part, improve underlying social conditions that lead to unwanted pregnancies.

"There is a much bigger picture and much broader challenge: how we stabilise our families, how we protect our children, how we make sure their sexuality is developed in a way that they are not immoral and putting themselves into the position that they are in," Ward said.