According to a report on abortion in 2004 published by the DRESS (French department of research, studies, assessment and statistics), the number of abortions is continuing to rise, particularly among minors.

In 2004, 11,500 young women between the ages of 15 and 17 had an abortion, representing 1 in 100 women in this age group. Geographically, the number of abortions among minors was the highest in the north of France and in the overseas departments.

Contraception is increasingly common among young people. Among the different contraception methods employed, condom use practically doubled between 2000 and 2005. The pill remains the most widely used method with 68% of 15 to 19-year-olds stating they used it.

Use of emergency contraception (morning-after pill - Norlevo) has never been so high. Since June 1999, this pill has been available without a prescription. Since 2000, it has been authorised for distribution by school nurses and has been available in pharmacies without charge since 2002. In 2005, over a million pills were sold, six times the amount sold in 1999. 13.7% of women between 15 and 54 and 30% of 15 to 24-year-olds have already taken it.

By marketing human embryonic stem cells, Scotland hopes to become a world leader in stem cell biotechnologies.

The new 2-million-pound Roslin Cell Centre has been created to market human embryonic stem cell lines. The centre is a partnership between the Roslin Institute (where Dolly the sheep was cloned), Edinburgh University and the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service. The Roslin Cell Centre has announced it will be able to sell human embryonic stem cells to "non-profit" companies from 2007. 

The stem cell lines will be created from donated eggs and embryos and sold without any rights of property. The price per unit has been set at around £5,000.

Scottish companies currently subsidising the project have said it will be financially independent within three years and help to make Scotland a centre for biotechnology investment and job creation.

British researchers have already expressed their concern over this project. Dr Nico Forraz, a researcher at Newcastle University's United Kingdom Centre for Cord Blood, condemned the sale of these cells for ethical reasons. He particularly warned against the danger of selling them "to anybody, for example unscrupulous private companies or clinics which would inject them into patients in distress for tens of thousands of dollars". He stressed that the human embryonic stem cell line creation procedure was not yet up to clinical standards.
 

Work by a combined British and Spanish team led by Miodrag Stojkovic (Prince Felipe Research Centre in Valencia) involving the creation of a stem cell line from a human embryo "considered dead" has been published online by the journal Stem Cells.

The researchers studied 132 "arrested" embryos, donated by an in-vitro fertilisation clinic with the consent of the patients. Cell division stopped between 24 and 48 hours after the embryos had reached various stages of development. Thirteen of these embryos had developed more than the others, reaching 16 to 24 cells before "growth stopped". The researchers succeeded in creating a stem cell from one of the embryos.

According to Dr. Donald Landry, director of the division of experimental therapeutics at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who proposed the idea of this experiment, "an embryo is dead once its cells irreversibly stop working together to function as a single organism". For him, using methods like Dr Stojkovic's to create stem cell lines overcomes ethical issues raised by the destruction of embryos. Using cells from dead embryos then amounts to organ donation, in the same way as harvesting organs from dead patients.

However, a number of researchers expressed their disagreement. "There is no way to prove that an arrested embryo would have stopped growing if it had been put into a woman's womb rather than a lab dish, which leaves open the possibility that it was the lab conditions that halted its growth," said Robin Lovell-Badge of the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in London.

For the Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, "an embryo may not be dead if individual cells are still alive and able to create stem cell lines". Scientists know too little about embryos in their early stages of development to really determine when they are dead.

According to Dr George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, stem cells from arrested embryos might carry the risk of some undetected defect, making them dangerous to use.

French daily La Croix has drawn up a special report on so-called unwanted pregnancies among women and young girls in Latin America.

Feminist organisations declared Thursday "Decriminalisation and Legalisation of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean Day". Most countries in Latin America place either a total or a partial ban on abortion.

Many women in these countries fall pregnant during adolescence, particularly among the poorest populations. In 1998, the population of women between 20 and 24 to have had their first child before the age of 20 was 38% in Bolivia, 27% in Peru and 50% in Guatemala. In Brazil, a recent study showed that 14% of young women had their first child between 10 and 12, 45% between 16 and 18 and 6% between 22 and 24. Maternal and infant mortality rates are high, caused mainly by poor hygiene conditions and difficult access to medical treatment and aftercare.