Family planning leaders should help women with unwanted pregnancies obtain safe, legal abortion

Millions of women in Africa and the developing world will continue to suffer and die needlessly unless the global family planning community confronts its responsibility to help women with unwanted pregnancies obtain safe, legal abortion, said a former U.S. government official at a briefing in Dakar today.

Discussions at this week’s International Family Planning Conference attest to significant progress in improving women’s access to effective contraception and life-saving postabortion care. But these efforts are not enough, said Ipas President and CEO Elizabeth Maguire. The international family planning community in particular can and must do much more to protect women from unsafe abortion.

“It is within the power of family planning programs and providers to ensure that each woman experiencing an unwanted pregnancy receives counseling, and, if she wishes to terminate the pregnancy, is referred for a safe, legal abortion in the same or a nearby facility,” Maguire said. “Currently, few programs require or train family planning providers to offer such counseling or referral.”

Together with reproductive health leaders from the African region, Maguire (who led the U.S. international family planning program under President Clinton) called on donors, governments and non-governmental organizations to take decisive actions to end the cycle of unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortion, which has had an especially devastating impact in Africa. Women receiving postabortion care should get contraceptive counseling and family planning providers should be trained to support women facing unwanted pregnancies.

Every African country permits abortion at least to save a woman’s life, she said, and more than 40 percent allow it in cases of rape, incest and fetal impairment. “But safe services, even to the extent of the law, are unavailable or inaccessible in most parts of Africa,” contributing to more than 6 million unsafe abortions across the continent each year and about 29,000 preventable deaths, Maguire said.

Dr. Eunice Brookman-Amissah, a former Minister of Health of Ghana and Ipas’s Vice President for Africa, noted important recent policy improvements related to reducing unsafe abortion in Africa. For example, Ethiopia, Kenya and several Francophone countries have expanded indications for legal abortion, and governments in Ghana, South Africa and Zambia have made new commitments to scale up safe abortion services.

In addition, she said, global and regional policy agreements offer important opportunities for further progress. “African governments have made promises to women through international commitments and regional agreements such as the Maputo Protocol and Plan of Action,” she said. “If they truly value women’s health and lives, they must keep those promises.”

Dr. Edgar Kuchingale, a leading gynecologist and researcher from Malawi, described the impact of unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortion on women and the health-care system in his country. The huge burden that caring for women suffering from complications of unsafe abortion imposes on the government is one factor contributing to growing support for reform of Malawi’s restrictive abortion law, he said. “Beyond the money, the human costs of unsafe abortion are simply intolerable,” he said, “and completely avoidable.”

Dr. Otobo Ujah, a young Nigerian physician, said he wanted to see the end of unsafe abortion in Africa early in his career. “Globally, 60 percent of deaths from unsafe abortion occur among women under 24,” he said. “Clearly, young people need information and services to help them prevent and manage unwanted pregnancy safely.”

Source: http://www.ipas.org