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Notes -
That reminds me of a question I wanted to ask an actual Finn: as I understand it, Finnish abortion law requires (or required until recently?) medical justification for abortion. Was this strictly applied, or were medical justification given as a matter of course, or somewhere in between? Or am I completely misunderstanding Finnish abortion law?
From what I've heard, it was basically a formality and given as a matter of course. The main sticking point to pro-choicers (maybe a slightly odd term, as there's not a "separate" pro-choice movement here - the campaigning on this is done by feminist movements in general, and the clear majority of the society shares the pro-choice view anyway) was that abortion required approval (again, usually given as a matter of course) by two separate doctors.
The Finnish parliament just recently liberalized this law, moving to a general European practice of abortion on request before 12 weeks (and removing the two-doctor requirement). This was actually not a major culture war in Finland and, outside of people specifically interested in this issue politically, probably passed with little notice.
Some feminists tried to get a little bit of a thing going to present this as a response to the fall of Roe v Wade, if I remember correctly, though the citizens initiative had started collecting signatures a good while before last summer. This is actually probably pretty typical of European political efforts that are sometimes seen by Americans as overt European reactions to American internal affairs, they are usually related to European internal politics with someone then just inventing some connection to American current events as a hook for a bit of media attention.
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