Using communications technology to increase young women’s access to information about safe, medical abortion

Richard Lord

During the week of February 15, Ipas invited several guest speakers as “Experts in Residence” regarding young women’s access to medical abortion. The purpose of the Experts program, which began in 2008 with guest Danielle Hassoun, a French ob-gyn, is to stimulate new ideas and foster innovative thinking in the area of medical abortion, and provide formal and informal opportunities to learn from the expertise of colleagues with diverse experiences. The workshops and discussions this time focused on expanding young women’s access to medical abortion, understanding the unique barriers they face and identifying innovative strategies to create opportunities for change.   

“Almost half of the deaths from unsafe abortion worldwide are of girls and young women under 25 years old, so clearly, their needs are not yet being met,” said Evelina Borjesson, youth program associate at Ipas. “Young women do not make up a homogenous group, yet something that we’ve seen across a number of settings is that adolescents seek abortion information and care from different sources than older women, in large part to ensure privacy and confidentiality” she continued.

Young women’s barriers to safe medical abortion include not only a lack of privacy and the constraints of social control exerted by family, schools, and culture, but also the lack of accurate information on medical abortion, said Eugenia López, executive coordinator of Balance Promoción para el Desarrollo y Juventud and coordinator for the  MARIA Abortion Fund for Social Justice, which is a project of Balance that provides informational and financial resources for women to obtain safe abortion. Using telephones and the Internet, women from across Mexico contact the Maria Fund to get information and support for obtaining a safe abortion in Mexico City, where abortion is legally permitted.

Sometimes, she noted, pharmacies — which are often the first point of contact for many women seeking safe abortion — don’t have accurate information and tell people to use incorrect doses of misoprostol, a medicine that is safe and effective for abortion if used correctly. Several Experts in Residence workshop participants from various countries, including South Africa and India, agreed that more outreach to pharmacists, other health-care providers and women is needed to ensure access and safety. Some women also don’t know manual vacuum aspiration is available as another safe option, López added.

“I think [communications technology] is very important,” López says. The strategies the Maria Fund uses to disseminate information are heavily dependent on the use of cell phones, which López says are an accessible means of communication in Mexico. “We have found that almost all young women have access to cell phones,” she says, “Even where there are no land lines, there are cell phones in Mexico.” In fact, according to a recent United Nations report, more than half the people in the developing world are cell phone subscribers. Communicating through the Internet and through phone gives young women greater confidentiality than seeking information in person, she pointed out.

Another visiting expert, Sara Larrea of  Coordinadora Juvenil por la Equidad de Genero (Youth Committee for Gender Equality) in Ecuador, talked about how her youth-led organization uses a human rights approach to give women information on the safe use of medical abortion. When asked about what changes they wish to see in the future, the experts’ answers center on reproductive justice: “That women have the means to choose,” Larrea says, “not just the ability.”

For more information, contact media@ipas.org