For women who want to end their pregnancies, laws that allow only medical doctors to provide abortion are real barriers. Abortion can safely be provided by nurses, midwives, paramedical personnel and other midlevel providers. Women who have correct information can take pills to end a pregnancy safely outside a health facility. However, many abortion laws require the involvement of one or more medical doctors. These laws criminalize women and other health professionals who end pregnancies safely without a doctor. Under doctor-only laws, health systems—particularly in the global south—cannot train enough abortion providers to make abortion accessible to all women. Doctor-only laws discriminate against women who belong to vulnerable and disadvantaged groups and who are least likely to have access to medical doctors. Lawmakers need not designate who can provide abortion in the law. Documents such as national health standards and guidelines are better suited to clarify who are authorized providers. This publication explains how Standards and Guidelines, enacted by the Ministry of Health and ideally updated every few years, can reflect the latest scientific evidence in abortion care.
The United States, as the world’s foreign assistance leader, must play a key role in safeguarding a comprehensive and integrated approach to sexual and reproductive health and rights for young women. This fact sheet outlines policy challenges that deny young women their sexual and reproductive rights and puts forth policy actions the U.S. government should take: expand family planning funding, repeal the damaging Helms Amendment, permanently repeal the Mexico City Policy (also called the Global Gag Rule), and continue to work toward a progressive sexual and reproductive health agenda in platforms like the International Conference on Population and Development and the United Nations.
This resource is designed to help advocates and policymakers promote laws and policies that support access to safe abortion for young women. Parental involvement requirements in law or policy are common barriers that push young women toward illegal and often unsafe abortion.
This publication provides evidence and explanation for why Ipas urges governments and policymakers to ensure that all young women—including survivors of sexual violence—have access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care, including safe abortion services.
This toolkit is designed to help reproductive rights advocates participate in national constitutional reform processes. It looks at the potential consequences of constitutional protection of life at conception and outlines ways reproductive rights advocates can influence the constitutional reform process. It also may be useful for advocates facing constitutional amendments or engaging in litigation.
Health professionals’ refusal to provide service that they oppose on moral or religious grounds is a significant barrier to women’s access to safe abortion and other reproductive health services. This resource contains recommendations for enacting laws and regulations that safeguard women’s access to services while still protecting providers’ rights of conscience. It also provides information on human rights standards that address provider refusal and includes a list of further resources.
Organized in four parts, this training manual aims to foster an advocacy perspective in health-care providers who are involved in delivering abortion and/or postabortion care. The manual will help providers recognize their personal power as advocates and identify different circumstances and means to advocate for comprehensive abortion care to the full limits of the law.
The Helms amendment is a law barring U.S. foreign assistance from being used for abortion services. This fact sheet describes the negative impact of the Helms amendment on women in Kenya, where abortion is legal under certain circumstances.
This memo summarizes key findings from an online survey among 800 registered voters nationwide conducted by Hart Research on behalf of Ipas.
This factsheet provides an overview of the Helms Amendment and how it harms the world’s most vulnerable women by denying them access to safe abortion services.
When talking about the Helms Amendment and U.S. foreign assistance for safe abortion, these key messages are simple and represent what voters feel, according to 2020 polling results.
Even as governments around the world are liberalizing their abortion laws, the vast majority of countries still legally require one or more healthcare providers to approve or perform abortion. Such requirements criminalize women who lack access to healthcare providers and seek abortion without one. Such women are often the world’s poorest and most marginalized women.
Since the liberalization of Nepal’s abortion law in 2002, intensive provider training and facility support have proven successful strategies for increasing the availability of comprehensive abortion care (CAC) services in the country. However, little is known about the pathways through which women access safe abortion services. This publication presents research on how women in Nepal access safe abortion information and services, including evidence-based recommendations indicating that increasing contraceptive education and access to female community health volunteers can improve women’s ability to manage their reproductive health.
This document gives a summary analysis of primary and secondary data documenting unsafe abortion and the impact of the criminalization of abortion on women’s lives and health and on health services in 5 Brazilian states: Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, BahÃa, Pernambuco, and ParaÃba.
This publication highlights the work in Nepal since legal reform a decade ago and puts a spotlight on the key ingredients for successful scale-up of abortion care, including partnerships with government and NGOs and integration of abortion within the country’s Safe Motherhood program.
This is a fact sheet with statistical information on the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents in the Mexican state of Guerrero. It is meant to provide relevant information on sexual and reproductive health indicators to health and policy makers as well as recommendation for improving sexual and reproductive health services and access.
This fact sheet describes the impact of unsafe abortion in Sierra Leone as evidenced by three studies.
Sexual violence can have devastating effects on individuals, families, communities and societies. The findings from the study presented in this report are part of a regional collaboration in Central America to prevent sexual violence and to ensure that victims and survivors have access to all the services provided by the health and justice systems that they may need.
This handbook, written by Prof. Charles Ngwena and published by the Ipas Africa Alliance, is designed to raise judges’ awareness about the human rights obligations associated with abortion. Judges can use it as a guide to interpret and apply domestic abortion laws, taking into account global and regional human rights standards
The February 2016 WHO declaration that congenital Zika virus syndrome constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern reacted to the outbreak of the syndrome in Brazil. But the government’s urging to contain the syndrome, which is associated with microcephaly among newborns, is confounded by lack of reproductive health services. Women with low incomes in particular have little access to such health services. The emergency also illuminates the harm of restrictive abortion legislation, and the potential violation of human rights regarding women’s health. Proposed suggestions for remedying the widespread health-care inequities in Brazil are instructive for other countries where congenital Zika virus syndrome is prevalent.