Rollback and Resistance: The Erosion of Abortion Access in Argentina

Dec 10, 2025
Mercedes Sayagues

The movie “Belén”, Argentina’s submission for the 2026 Oscars, tells the story of a 26-year-old woman who suffered a miscarriage in a hospital in Tucuman province in 2014 and was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2016 after being convicted of procuring an illegal abortion.

Her case sparked a nationwide campaign to decriminalize abortion, known as the Green Tide after the green scarves protestors wore.

In December 2020, the Green Tide won: abortion was legalized on request up to 14 weeks, and later in cases of rape or risk to the woman’s physical or mental health.

Continued: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/rollback-and-resistance-the-erosion-of-abortion-access-in-argentina/

How dangerous are unsafe abortions? WHO report paints a grim picture

A WHO report reveals that 73 million abortions occur annually, with unsafe procedures causing severe physical complications, mental trauma, and major public health burdens

Tisha Elizabeth Jacob
December 10, 2025

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that around 73 million induced abortions take place across the globe each year. Six out of 10 (61 per cent) of all unintended pregnancies, and 3 out of 10 (29 per cent) of all pregnancies, end in induced abortion.

While one might look at abortion as a matter of individual choice, it is also a public health issue that affects communities and countries.

Lack of access to safe, affordable, timely and respectful abortion care, and the stigma associated with abortion, pose risks to women’s physical and mental well-being throughout their lives. Estimates from 2012 also indicate that in developing countries alone, 7 million women per year were treated in hospital facilities for complications of unsafe abortion, WHO reported.

Continued: https://www.theweek.in/news/health/2025/12/10/how-dangerous-are-unsafe-abortions-who-report-paints-a-grim-picture.html

10.12.2025

News

abortion as public health issue

abortion stigma

maternal mortality

World Health Organization

Canada – Anti-abortion billboards in West Kelowna, B.C., coming down

December 9, 2025
Video – 2:24 minutes

Billboards with anti-abortion messages may soon be coming down in the Kelowna area. For many years, a local billboard company has allowed the signs along Highway 97 through West Kelowna. As Brady Strachan reports, pressure from a local pro-choice advocate has led to a policy change.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7009750

09.12.2025

Videos/Images

anti-choice billboards

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misinformation

BC Billboards

BC Humanist Association

Abortion in humanitarian settings: What new data from Uganda and Kenya reveal

Incidence and safety of abortion in two humanitarian settings in Uganda and Kenya: a respondent-driven sampling study

December 9, 2025
Ipas

Published in The Lancet Clinical Medicine Led by Ipas in partnership with Ibis Reproductive Health, the International Rescue Committee, African Population and Health Research Centre, and Resilience Action International, this research is one of only a few studies on abortion in humanitarian settings. It provides critical new data on abortion from communities often excluded from sexual and reproductive health research.

Main takeaway: In two of East Africa’s largest refugee settings—Bidibidi (Uganda) and Kakuma (Kenya)—researchers conducted the first-ever study to estimate abortion incidence using respondent-driven sampling (RDS) in a humanitarian context. The results highlight an overlooked reality: displaced people seek abortion care at higher rates but face limited options and extreme risks from resorting to unsafe methods.

Continued: https://www.ipas.org/news/abortion-in-humanitarian-settings-research-uganda-and-kenya/

09.12.2025

Research

abortion in humanitarian settings

African Population and Health Research Centre

Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises Programme

Ibis Reproductive Health

International Rescue Committee

Ipas

Resilience Action International

When floods rise in Pakistan, women’s reproductive health falls behind

Uzma Shahid, Program Manager, Ipas Pakistan
December 8, 2025

This story reflects my firsthand observations during a monitoring visit to a flood-affected community. I spent a day in the community, conducting a focus group discussion with women on their reproductive health needs before and during disasters. This is how I learnt the story of Sehrish* and her heartbreaking pregnancy and miscarriage experience. I went to meet her and later discussed the matter with the camp doctor who I requested to visit Sehrish at her home before the camp closed in the community.

Unprecedented flooding during the 2025 monsoon season in Pakistan led to more than 1,000 deaths, thousands injured, and nearly seven million people impacted since June. Around three million people have been displaced by flood waters so far. In climate-induced crises like these, women and girls are disproportionately impacted. Many face unmet reproductive health needs…

Continued: https://www.ipas.org/news/floods-pakistan-womens-reproductive-health/

08.12.2025

Commentary

Ipas Pakistan

Rahnuma-Family Planning Association of Pakistan

Building climate-resilient reproductive health care in Zambia: Ipas’s on-the-job training innovation

Ipas
December 8, 2025

For nearly two decades, Ipas Zambia has worked closely with the Ministry of Health to reduce maternal deaths caused by unsafe abortion and to expand access to safe abortion services nationwide. However, despite the progress made, persistent and emerging challenges, including the growing impact of climate change, continue to affect sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

As climate-related disasters intensify globally, Zambia has been severely affected. The country has been experiencing adverse impacts for several years, including an increase in the frequency and severity of seasonal droughts, occasional dry spells, increased temperatures in valleys, flash floods, and changes in the growing season, according to the United Nations Development Programme. These extreme weather events often cut off communities from central health facilities, limiting women’s access to timely and essential reproductive health services.

Continued: https://www.ipas.org/news/building-climate-resilient-reproductive-health-care-in-zambia-ipass-on-the-job-training-innovation/

Ipas Tasks Journalists, Others On Awareness About Dangers Of Unsafe Abortion

by Chibuzor Emejor
December 8, 2025

Ipas Nigeria Health Foundation, has tasked journalists, civil society organisations and content creators to intensify awareness on the dangers associated with unsafe abortions among women and girls in Nigeria.

Dr.Lucky Palmer,Country Director, Ipas Nigeria Health Foundation, gave the task at a three-day Media Training on Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, organised for journalists, civil society groups,content creators in Keffi, Nasarawa State.

Continued: https://independent.ng/ipas-tasks-journalists-others-on-awareness-about-dangers-of-unsafe-abortion/

08.12.2025

Ipas Nigeria Health Foundation

Maputo Protocol

maternal mortality and morbidity

National Guidelines on Safe Termination of Pregnancy for Legal Indications

The crisis of unsafe abortion in Malawi: When human rights are denied, women and girls die

By Mandipa Machacha and Tsidi Leatswe
8 December 2025

When Tadala Zindawa**, (21) from Tata village in Lilongwe’s Chitukula area, fell pregnant while in secondary school, she was overcome by fear and panic. Scared of her parents’ disapproval and with abortion criminalized in Malawi, Tadala resorted to unsafe methods using Aloe Vera or Surf Soap to induce abortion. The procedure not only failed, but it led to severe pain and heavy bleeding. She survived after post-abortion care, but the psychological and physical scars are lifelong.

Nevertheless, Tadala is one of the lucky ones.

Every year, hundreds of women and girls in Malawi die or are injured from pregnancy and childbirth-related complications. According to the Malawi Ministry of Health and the Guttmacher Institute, about 141,000 abortions occur annually in Malawi, the vast majority unsafe and accounting for 6–18% of maternal deaths.

Continued: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2025/12/the-crisis-of-unsafe-abortion-in-malawi-when-human-rights-are-denied-women-and-girls-die/

Why Quebec’s plan to enshrine abortion rights is raising alarms

By Marisela Amador
Published: December 07, 2025

Civil society groups are warning that the Legault government’s plan to enshrine abortion rights in Quebec’s proposed constitution could have unintended consequences.

But Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette says the point of writing the measure into law is to protect those rights, adding that he worries future courts could overturn decisions that currently uphold the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/why-quebecs-plan-to-enshrine-abortion-rights-is-raising-alarms/

A Small Illinois City at the Center of a Seismic Shift in Abortion Access

Carbondale, Ill., a liberal enclave within driving distance of 10 states with abortion bans, has become a hub for the procedure. Last year there were nearly 11,000 abortions in this city of 21,000.

By Elizabeth Williamson
Photographs by Julia Rendleman
Dec. 7, 2025

The cars and pickup trucks from Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi started arriving early in the morning at the Alamo Women’s Clinic in Carbondale, Ill. Men were not allowed inside, so most waited in the parking lot, scrolling or dozing, exhausted after driving through the night.

Abortion is legal in Illinois, but the state is surrounded by others that have largely banned the procedure in the three years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As a result, Illinois now leads the nation in out-of-state abortion patients. Carbondale, a college town in Illinois’s southern tip within driving distance of 10 states with abortion bans, has become a major abortion hub.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/us/politics/abortion-carbondale.html