New guidelines on abortion to help countries deliver lifesaving care
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently issued new guidelines on abortion care to protect women's and girls' health and avoid over 25 million unsafe abortions annually. Every death and damage caused by improper abortion is absolutely avoidable. Women and girls should therefore have access to abortion and family planning. With over 50 recommendations covering clinical practice, health care delivery, legal and policy activities, these guidelines improve abortion care.
Abortion is a simple and highly safe operation when performed with the assistance of trained professionals. Sadly, only around half of all abortions are performed safely, resulting in 39,000 deaths and millions more women hospitalised due to complications. Most of these deaths occur in low-income countries – 60% in Africa, 30% in Asia – and the most vulnerable.
The guideline includes basic primary care level measures to improve the quality of abortion care for women and girls. These include increasing task sharing among health providers, increasing the availability of medical abortion pills so more women can receive safe abortion services, and providing accurate information on treatment to all individuals who need it. Interestingly the guidelines advocate using telemedicine to support access to abortion and family planning services for the first time.
To know about the WHO guideline on safe abortion, please visit their website.
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