African leaders unite to save women’s lives from unsafe abortion

More than 100 medical professionals, legal experts, researchers, ministers of health, youth leaders, parliamentarians and women’s health activists from 15 African countries convene tomorrow for the first-ever regional consultation on unsafe abortion, a global public-health crisis that has affected tens of millions of African women and their families.

Objectives of the three-day “Action to Reduce Maternal Mortality in Africa” conference include encouraging greater attention to making legal abortion safe and available to African women, about 30,000 of whom die every year from complications of abortions that are self-induced or performed by unqualified personnel, often in unhygienic settings. Globally, nearly 70,000 women worldwide die each year from unsafe abortion, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and millions more are injured. Experts agree that these deaths and injuries are entirely preventable, including through better provision of family planning and other measures to prevent abortion.

Every African country legally permits abortion in at least some circumstances – such as in cases of rape, incest or to save a woman’s life. But there is often a huge chasm between women’s right to legal abortion and their ability to obtain safe abortion services. Ethiopia is one of the countries hardest hit. Recently, WHO officials said that more Ethiopian women die in hospital from complications of unsafe, usually illegal abortion than from almost any other cause, and that about 70 percent of women brought to hospital suffering from serious problems after back-street abortions die. Most are between the ages of 16 and 20.

“The death of a young girl from unsafe abortion is a loss to the whole society,” said Dr. Eunice Brookman-Amissah, a former Minister of Health of Ghana who now heads the Ipas Africa Alliance for Women's Reproductive Health and Rights, one of the conference organizers.

The conference is chaired by Dr. Fred Sai of Ghana, former president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and former senior advisor on population for the World Bank. Conference attendees will examine laws, policies and international commitments influencing access to safe abortion care in Africa; health systems’ role in meeting women’s needs for safe abortion care; and strategies for creating an enabling environment that supports women’s right to safe abortion care.

Organizers note that the need to address unsafe abortion is particularly urgent in light of recent steps by the U.S. government – the leading international funder of family planning and other reproductive-health programs in developing countries. Along with 178 other nations, at the 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) the United States agreed on the need to make abortion safe where it is legal and to take other steps to protect women from unsafe abortion. But the administration of President George W. Bush has seemed to back off from those commitments. For example, in January 2001 Bush reinstituted the Global Gag Rule, which disqualifies foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from receiving U.S. family planning funding if they provide counseling on abortion, provide safe, legal abortion services (except in very narrow circumstances), or participate in political debate surrounding abortion.

“The gag rule’s impact in Africa is tragic," said Brookman-Amissah. "As leaders who are concerned about Africa’s women and Africa’s future, we cannot and will not be gagged. We must speak out and we must do something to stop unsafe abortion from killing our women and girls.”

Other cosponsors of the consultation are Amanitare African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls; the Centre for Gender and Development of the Economic Commission of Africa; the Commonwealth Regional Health Community Secretariat (CRHCS); and the Regional Prevention of Maternal Mortality Network (RPMMN). The local host committee includes the Ethiopian Ministry for Women’s Affairs, the Ethiopian Office of Population, the Family Guidance Association of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ESOG).

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258