By Doris Kathia and Purity Nthiana
May 1, 2021
Globally there are 214 million women with an unmet need for contraception. The unmet need for family planning remains high in Kenya with about one in four married women not able to access contraceptives.
Only three in every 10 adolescents and young women are using a modern contraceptive method.
By Janees Rafiq
26th October, 2020
Unsafe abortions have devastating effects on women’s health. Every year around 42 million women with unintended pregnancies choose abortion. Nearly half of these procedures that about 20 million abortions are unsafe. Around 68,000 women die because of unsafe abortions, making it one of the causes of increasing maternal mortality rate. Of women who survive unsafe abortions, 5 million suffer long-term health complications. Unsafe abortion is thus a pressing issue.
While some abortions are self-induced, most of them are performed by providers lacking required qualifications and skills to perform abortions and hence termed unsafe WHO defines unsafe abortion as a procedure for terminating an unintended pregnancy carried out either by persons lacking skills or in an environment that does not conform to minimal medical standards or both. According to WHO, every 8 minutes, a woman in a developing country dies due to complications arising out of unsafe abortions.
Continued: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2020/10/unsafe-abortions-a-threat-to-womans-life/
World Contraception Day takes place on September 26th every year. Under its campaign, every pregnancy is wanted. But in Uganda, this vision came under attack because of the lockdown which made access to sex easy but hard or impossible to family planning services and information. The result was an explosion of unplanned pregnancies and abortions as Agnes Kyotalengerire found out.
By Agnes Kyotalengerire
6th October
2020
Monicak
Kayesu' story
When Monica Kayesu, 36, a mother of four, sought family planning
services earlier this year, she settled for an intrauterine device (IUD). Unfortunately, the lockdown took effect at on
March 20th, the day she was to have the coil inserted. With public transport
banned, Kayesu could not get it inserted in April and conceived in May. She is
five months pregnant and cannot come to terms with the idea of having a fifth
child.
Continued: https://www.newvision.co.ug/news/1528596/spike-unplanned-pregnancies-abortions
STEVIE EMILIA, THE JAKARTA POST
Jakarta / Tue, September 29, 2020
Abortion – safe or unsafe, legal or illegal – has existed throughout history. Yet, it continues to be the most sensitive and controversial issue in reproductive health.
The WHO has disclosed that an average of 73.3 million – safe and unsafe – abortions took place worldwide per year between 2015 and 2019, with the rate of abortions being higher in developing regions than in developed ones.
Abortion Law: Global Comparisons
A recent spate of state laws to restrict abortion services in the United States has reignited debate over the procedure. How does the United States’ regulation of abortion compare to the rest of the world?
by Rachel B. Vogelstein and Rebecca Turkington
July 15, 2019
The past fifty years have been characterized by an unmistakable trend toward the liberalization of abortion laws, particularly in the industrialized world. Amid ongoing debate over the procedure, the trend has coincided with a drop in abortion rates worldwide. As nations across the globe have expanded the grounds on which women can access reproductive health services, the quality and safety of abortion care has improved, as has maternal survival.
Abortion rates are relatively similar between countries with highly restrictive abortion laws and those where the procedure is permitted without restriction, at between 34 and 37 per 1,000 women annually [PDF], but the safety of the procedure diverges widely: almost 90 percent of abortions in countries with liberal abortion laws are considered safe, compared with only 25 percent of those in countries in which abortion is banned.
Continued: https://www.cfr.org/article/abortion-law-global-comparisons
A human health project
Empowering women to make reproductive choices and opt for quality family planning services can help India not only address the fertility challenge but fulfill the ICPD pledge
Friday, 12 July 2019
Swapna Majumdar
Ever since 1989, July 11 is observed as the World Population Day to draw attention to issues surrounding human population. The urgent need to provide an enabling environment to facilitate women’s autonomy in reproductive decisions was underlined five years later in 1994 at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). Here, for the first time, an international agreement, recognising the right to sexual and reproductive health, was signed by 179 countries, including India.
Twenty five years have passed since the historic ICPD Programme of Action. Although India has taken several measures to provide universal access to reproductive health services, including contraceptives, has it really delivered on its promise to give women the right to choose when, if and how many children to have?
Continued: https://www.dailypioneer.com/2019/columnists/a-human-health-project.html
In Developing Regions, Greater Investment Is Needed to Help Adolescents Prevent Unintended Pregnancy
Nov 9, 2018
20 Million Adolescent Women Have an Unmet Need for Modern Contraception
Ensuring that adolescent women are able to choose whether and when to have children is crucial to their sexual and reproductive health, yet new data published today by the Guttmacher Institute show that contraceptive services in developing regions fall short of meeting adolescents’ needs. The new data, published in a series of fact sheets, indicate that as of 2017, an estimated 36 million young women aged 15–19 in developing regions are married or sexually active and want to avoid becoming pregnant in the next two years. Yet the majority of this group—20 million adolescents—are not using a modern contraceptive method and thus have an unmet need for modern contraception. Most adolescent women with unmet need are using no contraceptive method (85%), while the remaining 15% are using traditional methods, such as withdrawal or periodic abstinence, which are less effective than modern methods.
‘Reduce Stigma To Make Women Comfortable Accessing Safe Abortions’
Swagata Yadavar
August 7, 2018
New Delhi: Abortion was legalised in India almost half a century ago, yet unsafe abortions – performed in unhygienic conditions by untrained providers – are the third largest cause of maternal death. Nearly 78% of the more than 15 million abortions conducted annually in India are outside of health facilities, giving rise to safety concerns. There is only one licensed provider for 224,000 women in rural areas.
India allows medical termination of a pregnancy of up to 20 weeks’ gestation to be conducted by a registered medical practitioner. There have been attempts to amend the act to expand the provider base to include nurses and non-allopathic medicine practitioners, and extend the deadline to 24 weeks from the current 20.
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