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Number of foreign women seeking Swiss abortion services decreasing: report

Xinhua, August 12, 2015 Adjust font size:

While the number of abortions carried out in Switzerland has been slowly decreasing since 2011, figures also show that fewer foreign women are coming to the country to end their pregnancies, Swiss statistics agency said Tuesday.

The Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) reported that with 259 such cases recorded in 2014, accounting for 3 percent of all abortions taking place in Switzerland, the number of foreign women using Swiss abortion services has more than halved since 2008, when 600 cases were registered.

FSO said that since 2002, around 11,000 pregnancy interruptions have been reported on average each year in Switzerland. A total of 6.3 per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44 years and 3.7 per 1,000 girls between ages 15 to 19 sought specialized medical services in the confederation.

However, FSO revealed that disparities exist with the cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Neuchatel, Ticino, Basel and Zurich which report abortion rates above the national average.

Out of the close to 10,000 women living on Swiss soil who aborted last year, around half were foreign. The abortion rate of Latin American women was 15.2 per 1,000 women and the record showed that African women had a 35.1 per 1,000 abortion rate (down from 28.3 and 49.1 respectively in 2010).

One third of the women shared the rationale behind their pregnancy terminations. Ninety-three percent of those who provided a rationale cited psychosocial factors such as financial difficulties and their inability to care for a child as the main causes for their decision to abort. Endit