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May 2, 2005
Eastern Europe CAC training
After completing his comprehensive abortion care training, one participant said, “I started out as a skeptic. I thought I knew everything about this problem.”

Abortion continues to cause more than a quarter of all maternal deaths in Central and Eastern Europe. Though the task is daunting, Ipas and regional partners are committed to ensuring that every woman in the region has access to safe, woman-centered abortion and postabortion care services.

Among the factors causing the unnecessarily low quality of abortion care in the region are: shortages of equipment and medication, crowded facilities, poor hygienic conditions, lack of training, use of outdated technologies, inadequate standards and guidelines, a lack of contraceptive services and restrictive laws.

The article “Comprehensive Abortion Care in Central and Eastern Europe,” recently published in Entre Nous, the European Magazine for Sexual and Reproductive Health, summarizes the comprehensive approach that Ipas and regional partners are taking to address this multifaceted problem. The report was coauthored by Ipas’s U.S., Europe and Asia Regional Director Traci Baird, Europe Program Director Entela Shehu and U.S., Europe and Asia Associate Sarbaga Falk.

According to Baird, “Different countries where Ipas works are taking different paths to introducing comprehensive woman-centered abortion care. What they share, however, is the common goal of protecting the health and saving the lives of the millions of women living in the region.”

Transitioning to comprehensive, woman-centered abortion care requires taking into account the full range of factors that influence each woman’s physical and mental health needs.

The three key elements of this approach are choice, access and quality. Broadly defined, “choice” means that women have the right and opportunity to make free and informed decisions about their bodies and health. “Access” means that abortion services are available to all women who need them, regardless of geographic location, economic status or other considerations. Finally, although services vary according to the local context and available resources, fundamental components such as personalized care, confidentiality and postabortion contraception counseling ensure the “quality” of those services.

When these three elements are achieved, outcomes include:

To achieve these outcomes, one of Ipas’s main strategies is to train and equip providers in offering safe, effective, woman-centered services. Specifically, consistent with recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), Ipas is working to ensure that sharp curettage is replaced with safer methods, including manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) and ">medication abortion.

Ipas recently conducted a major regional workshop for medical-equipment distributors and health-care providers and trainers. Participants at the training, which was held in Istanbul in early April, represented nine Central and Eastern European countries— Albania, Armenia, Lithuania, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Macedonia, Uzbekistan and Khazakhstan.

The overall goal of the workshop, which combined theory with hands-on practice, was to increase the accessibility and availability of high-quality reproductive-health technologies, including the new Ipas MVA Plus®, in the region.

The workshop was unique in providing the opportunity for distributors and health-care providers to come together around the shared goal of achieving woman-centered care. The overall message, echoed again and again by the participants, was that distributing MVA instruments and offering medication abortion are not about financial gain; they are about giving women more choices for their health and lives.

Each of the 18 participants had a unique story to share about why they attended the training and what they learned from it.

Dr. Arshak Simonyan from Armenia, for example, said: “I started out as a skeptic. I thought I knew everything about this problem.” He and colleague Dr. Mary Khachikyan left the training convinced about the importance of MVA access for the women of Armenia and determined to train half the country’s 300 obstetricians and gynecologists by the end of the year.

Dr. Audrone Arlauskiene, who is the head of the society of obstetricians and gynecologists in Lithuania, is dedicated to increasing choices for women and health-care providers in her country. After attending Ipas’s workshop, she now plans to introduce the concept of comprehensive, woman-centered abortion care at a May 2005 conference of the private obstetricians and gynecologists in Lithuania. Introducing MVA in Lithuania, she expressed, provides the opportunity to improve the quality of women’s health care overall.

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