The fact that abortion is illegal in Indonesia (except in certain special circumstances) obviously does not eliminate the demand for abortion services. But without safe, legal abortion clinics to turn to, women are often desperate enough to go to one of the country’s many illegal abortion clinics. Some of those are run by doctors or people with at least some medical training.
But as a raid on an illegal abortion clinic in the Cikini neighborhood of Menteng today proved, many are staffed by people with no medical training at all.
“There was a middle man, a manager, an assistant doctor, and a doctor among them. We took into custody a doctor with the initial N, who is 75-years-old,” said Grand Commissioner Adi Vivid of the Jakarta Metro Police’s Special Crimes Investigation Directorate during the bust, as quoted by CNN Indonesia.
However, as Adi went on to explain, N isn’t actually a doctor. He had never received any medical training and, just like almost everybody else in the clinic, had only graduated from middle school.
“They taught themselves [how to perform abortions],” Adi said, adding that they had been running the clinic for five years.
The suspects who worked at the illegal clinics all face up to 10 years in prison and Rp 1 billion fines.
Despite abortion being illegal, this particular clinic supposedly still risked advertising their services online. This proved to be their eventual downfall as the police say they first learned about the clinic from their website.
The police believe there could be many more illegal abortion clinics in and around Menteng.
Just a couple of years ago, people openly sold abortion pills online and on social media, only for their accounts to be taken down as soon as they received unwanted attention from nationwide news coverage. However, doing just a little research into this story showed there are still many online accounts offering quick and discreet abortion “solutions”, which are inevitably incredibly dangerous.
But until Indonesia gives women the right to legal abortions, many will feel that they have no choice but to resort to dangerous illegal medicine and clinics.
