Ipas works to ensure that laws and policies around the world support women’s ability to obtain safe abortion care, including medical abortion. Working with local grassroots community groups, national NGOs, and global agencies such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization, Ipas supports local initiatives to reform and implement laws and policies affecting women’s reproductive rights. Our policy and advocacy work focuses on:

• Reducing legal and policy barriers
• Conducting legal and policy analysis
• Developing standards and guidelines

• Building capacity for advocacy
• Working with health-care provider networks
• Linking abortion access to other health, human rights, and social justice issues

Making abortion safe and legal can greatly reduce maternal deaths and injuries that result from unsafe abortion practices. In locations where the public health-care system is already increasing access to safe abortion services, medical abortion has the potential to expand the health system’s reach, eliminate inequality and disparities in access to care, and reduce costs for both women and health-care systems. Ipas works with health officials, health-care providers and advocates to increase access and dismantle legal barriers to safe abortion.

Ipas supports local efforts to amend laws that restrict abortion and ensure that laws enable broad access to all appropriate technologies, including medical abortion. Ipas advocates at country and global levels to include medical abortion drugs on essential medicine lists and in procurement systems and health standards and guidelines. In several countries, our registration activities are part of comprehensive strategies to introduce medical abortion that also include research, provider training and community outreach.

In many parts of the world, laws and policies were made before medical abortion existed. Not surprisingly, these laws rarely take into account the advantages that medical abortion and other relatively new medical technologies can offer. Together with local legal professionals, Ipas assesses how laws and policies govern the provision of medical abortion. Ipas uses these analyses to inform our programs and initiatives. The assessments also help to identify laws or policies that should be reformed to improve women’s access to abortion.

Ministries of health issue standards and guidelines to interpret and implement abortion laws. This guidance ensures that medical abortion is provided safely by setting standards for providers and facilities.

Ipas has worked with ministries of health in Brazil, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nepal and Vietnam to draft and disseminate national standards and guidelines for abortion care that incorporate medical abortion. We also work to ensure that standards and guidelines are written in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) evidence-based recommendations for abortion care. Ipas collaborated with WHO and other international health experts to ensure inclusion of medical abortion in WHO’s landmark technical and policy guidance for safe abortion, and subsequently ensured broad country-level and regional dissemination and use of the document as a key reference.

Our Safe Abortion Standards and Guidelines Toolkit provides guidance on the process of developing standards and guidelines for abortion care. (email medicalabortion@ipas.org to request a copy)

Ipas has a long history of collaborating with health-care providers and other professionals not only to improve clinical skills but to support their role as advocates for women’s reproductive health and rights. Ipas has worked with many lawyers’ groups, primarily in Africa, to increase their members’ knowledge of abortion issues and prepare them to advocate effectively for broader access to all appropriate abortion technologies, including medical abortion. Our advocacy tools include:

• Providers as advocates, a recently developed curriculum for health-care professionals interested in developing their advocacy skills.
• Making safe abortion accessible: A practical guide for advocates, a handbook providing advanced guidance for abortion advocates.

Ipas serves on the Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Rights Committee and the Unsafe Abortion Working Group of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO). As part of this group, we provided technical assistance to ensure that medical abortion is a recommended technology and included in training, clinical guidance and programmatic initiatives.

In Latin America, Ipas has worked closely with the Federation of Latin American Societies of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG), to draft and disseminate a technical manual outlining the many obstetrical uses of misoprostol, which serves as an advocacy tool for expanding access to misoprostol.

In Africa and around the world, Ipas works with representatives of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) to ensure that policies and standards include mid level health professionals in the provision of abortion care, often through the use of medical abortion. (read more)

Women with more financial resources and social connections can often terminate a pregnancy safely, regardless of how restrictive laws are regarding abortion where they live. Thus, the crisis of unsafe abortion disproportionately harms women with the least access to resources, including poor women, adolescents, refugees and women living in rural areas or those otherwise marginalized or disempowered.

Ipas works with international, regional, national and grassroots partners to address neglected women's rights issues and the rights of marginalized populations – including women who are subject to sexual violence or living with HIV/AIDS. These partnerships have broadened support for abortion access within the contexts of human rights and social justice. Medical abortion promises new opportunities for women who have difficulty navigating the traditional health system, eliminating some of the socio-economic barriers that keep them from being able to exercise their reproductive rights. 

Visit Ipas's Advocacy page for more information.