.- An international pro-life group has led a successful advocacy effort to remove a blog that had been promoting an illegal abortion drug in Peru.

“This is a significant victory because this website was the primary means of advertising and promoting the so-called ‘safe abortion hotline’,” said Carlos Polo, director of the Latin American office for the Population Research Institute, in a Jan. 31 briefing.

“And the hotline in turn was the chief means by which the abortion movement was attempting to promote, perform, and legalize abortions in pro-life Peru.”

The site had been encouraging women to perform “a dangerous and illegal chemical abortion” on themselves by obtaining and ingesting the drug misoprostol from a local pharmacy, Polo said, adding that the website “relentlessly promoted abortion.”

Misoprostol can be used to help reduce the risk of some ulcers, and it is available in the pro-life country. However, when taken by pregnant women, it can cause abortions.

As part of a campaign organized by the Population Research Institute, hundreds of Peruvians filed complaints with the blog host Blogspot to remove the site, on the grounds that it violated its policy against promoting drugs. The blog has now been removed.

“The site will no longer encourage women to abort their unborn children,” Polo said.

Peru’s constitution, like that of many Latin American countries, recognizes life as beginning at conception. Abortion is illegal, and attempts to advertise abortion on television, radio or in newspapers are “quickly shut down by the authorities,” according to Polo.

He said that international abortion groups such as Free Information for Women and Women on Waves are operating anonymous “hotlines” and websites to circumvent these laws.

They are focusing on misoprostol, a drug that can begin an early-term abortion in secret, he asserted, saying that women are then encouraged to enter government-run clinics and hospitals for the completion of the procedure on the grounds that they are suffering a “natural miscarriage.”

These activist groups are supported by “nearly all major pro-abortion and radical feminist organizations” in the Latin American Consortium Against Unsafe Abortion, he said.

Abortion activists hope to make the misoprostol-based abortion “so common” that legalization of all abortion will result, Polo charged, adding that the Population Research Institute is “working hard to help women in crisis pregnancies in Peru.”

“And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children will live.”

The Population Research Institute, based in Front Royal, Va., was founded in 1989 to fight coercive population control programs. It has a global network of pro-life groups in more than 30 countries. The institute opened its Latin American office in Lima, Peru, in 2004.

