Ipas > Ghana moving forward to ensure safe, legal abortion care

Ghana moving forward to ensure safe, legal abortion care

February 5, 2007

Ghanaian women will benefit from full implementation of the country’s abortion law.

Photo courtesy of Richard Lord.

Ghana has approved safe abortion standards and protocols as part of its national campaign to reduce maternal mortality and move the country closer to implementation of its abortion law, which was reformed decades ago but never widely enacted.

In June 2006, the Ghana Health Service and Ministry of Health adopted safe abortion guidelines prepared with technical assistance from Ipas, the World Health Organization, international experts and medical professionals from the West African nation.

The standards and protocols detailed in the guidelines outline the principles of comprehensive abortion care (CAC) and translate policy into specific instructions for facilities and providers.

Among the many areas covered, the standards and protocols:

Expand the base of abortion providers by authorizing midwives and nurses to perform first-trimester procedures;
Establish that counseling is an integral part of care before and after any abortion or postabortion procedure;
Codify the first national guidelines on medication abortion, an emerging method in Ghana and other low-resource settings;
Define mental health conditions that could qualify a patient for an abortion;
Create referral procedures appropriate to the type of provider or facility, such as community clinics, larger health centers and hospitals of all sizes;
Mandate record-keeping and reporting on CAC services.

In the introduction to the draft protocol, Ghana Health Service Director General Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa wrote: “In addressing national and international goals of reducing the unacceptably high maternal mortality and morbidity, it has become necessary to improve all aspects of policies, standards and protocols. In Ghana, complications of unsafe abortion contribute [to] 22 to 30 percent of all maternal deaths. This exceeds the World Health Organization estimate of 13 percent” worldwide.

The irony is that while Ghanaian women and girls continue to die or be maimed from unsafe abortions, Ghana has one of Africa’s more progressive abortion laws. While postabortion care has been readily accepted as a key component of emergency care, safe and legal abortion care has been on the books but often unavailable or inadequate.

After a 1985 reform of the criminal code, the law now allows abortion if pregnancy is the result of rape, incest or “defilement of a female idiot”; if the pregnancy endangers the woman’s physical or mental health; or if there is substantial risk that the child would suffer from a serious deformity.

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