Madrid, Spain, Nov 30, 2007 / 13:27 pm
According to official statistics from health officials in the Spanish region of Asturias, one in ten teenage girls has had an abortion during the last year. The figures represent the highest number of abortions during the last 18 years and confirm that the distribution of the morning-after pill has not resolved the problem.
Asturias has become the Spanish region with the seventh highest number of teen abortions. According to the Spanish daily “La Nueva España,” of the 57,000 women in Asturias between the ages of 15 and 24, 744 underwent abortions in 2005.
The newspaper reports that last year some 10,638 morning-after pills were distributed in Asturias, but that did not “stop abortions among Asturian teens. In 2006, the number of abortions among this group of the populace surged and came within one tenth of those that were performed in 2004, when the record for the number of teen abortions in Asturias since the end of the 1980s was broken.”
Amelia Gonzalez, general director of Public Health in Asturias, the data shows that “something is failing in the formation of our teens in the sexual-emotional area.”