Ipas authors draw on global experiences combating unsafe abortion in the new issue of Reproductive Health Matters

For the third time in its 10-year history, Reproductive Health Matters has dedicated an entire issue to the topic of abortion. The May 2002 issue of the journal, subtitled Abortion: Women Decide, focuses on the pressing need for safe, legal abortion services in the developing world. More than 20 full-length articles and shorter updates present comprehensive information and views on social, medical, ethical and other dimensions of this important public health issue. Highlights of the issue include a report on the World Health Organization's latest global estimates of unsafe abortion and its consequences and several articles contributed by Ipas staff and associates on various aspects of abortion care in Asia, Latin America and other regions.

According to the World Health Organization's most recent data, approximately 19 million unsafe abortions take place globally each year — meaning that about one in ten pregnancies ends in unsafe abortion. Unsafe abortion occurs mainly in the developing world, where it takes the lives of nearly 70,000 women each year. Groups of women most vulnerable to the perils of unsafe abortion include adolescents, refugees and women who have experienced sexual violence. Articles contributed by Ipas authors draw on the organization's work over nearly three decades to reduce abortion-related deaths and injuries and to increase women's ability to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights. For example:

• Ipas staff members Deborah Billings, Claudia Moreno, Celia Ramos and Rubén Ramírez, and Ipas consultant Deyanira González de León worked with members of the health department in Mexico City to co-author the article Constructing access to legal abortion services in Mexico City. The article details their collaborative effort to create a new model of care for survivors of sexual violence. The two groups have been working together in Mexico to provide legal abortion services for women who have been raped and to ensure that a wide range of appropriate services are available and accessible to all survivors of sexual violence.
  
• Bela Ganatra of Ipas and Siddhi Hirve of KEM Hospital in India co-authored the article Induced abortions among adolescent women in rural Maharashtra, India, addressing the significant barriers adolescent women in Maharashtra face in accessing safe abortion services, including a lack of independent income, constraints on their independence and mobility, and a pressing need to keep their activities a secret from family and friends. These barriers, along with provider attitudes and actions, often lead adolescent women to seek abortion care from untrained, unlicensed providers, resulting in a disproportionately high number of unsafe abortions among this age group.
  
• The article Should therapeutic abortion be legal in Nicaragua: the response of Nicaraguan obstetrician-gynaecologists, contributed by Heathe Luz McNaughton and Marta Maria Blandón of Ipas, focuses on a different group of individuals affected by unsafe abortion - the physicians who are responsible for saving women's lives. The article, co-written with Ligia Altamirano of the Nicaraguan Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, reveals that of the 198 obstetrician-gynecologist participants in the study, 95% believed that therapeutic abortion should not be criminalized.
  
• Aimee Lehmann, formerly of Ipas, authored the article Safe abortion: a right for refugees on the importance of providing refugees access to safe abortion care, a service that is often left out of the reproductive health-care services for refugee and displaced women. High levels of sexual violence in refugee settings and a lack of access to comprehensive health care contribute to making refugee women extremely vulnerable to the dangers of unsafe abortion.
  
• Bela Ganatra also co-authored an article with Nandini Oomman, titled Sex Selection: The Systematic Elimination of Girls, on the ethics of sex-selective abortions. Advocates for women's rights are facing the difficult dilemma of opposing sex-selective abortion, while supporting women's right to reproductive choice. The authors address this tension and suggest possible solutions.

The online issue of the current Reproductive Health Matters is available to subscribers. More information about the journal and becoming a subscriber can be found on the journal's main website.

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