Following the Turkish government’s recent initiative to legally restrict or ban abortion, a group of scientists have presented a report to parliament asking for a “constitutional guarantee for abortion.”

According to Hürriyet Daily News, the Turkish Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology presented a report to Parliament’s Constitutional Reconciliation Commission titled “Abortion: The right for fertility health and the right for health.” The society asked that women’s right to make decisions regarding “fertility health” be guaranteed in the new constitution.

The chairman of the association, Professor İsmail Mete İtil, told the HDN that the group presented their views in a written statement, and that they were asking for the right to healthy fertility.

The report indicates that the mortality rate of mothers in societies where abortion is illegal is high. Shocking figures from African, Latin American and Asian countries were cited in the report. It stated that annually some 46 million women had illegal abortions, and that 49 percent of these were performed in unsafe environments.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on May 30 that he had delivered instructions to the Cabinet to begin drafting new legislation on abortion in the wake of his recent comments equating the practice with murder.

“I have already told my ministers. We are preparing a law on abortion, and we are going to pass it,” Erdoğan said.

“There are similar laws that have been passed in many societies in the West in the same vein. Now that is what we are working on, too. This has a place among our values, for one. This cannot be permitted. May God forbid, things such as the threat of death are a different matter,” Erdoğan added.