New Guidelines on Abortion Care by WHO

Context

Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) presented new guidelines on abortion care.

Task sharing: These include task sharing by a wider range of health workers; ensuring access to medical abortion pills, which mean more women can obtain safe abortion services and making sure that accurate information on care is available to all those who need it.
Telemedicine: It also includes the recommendations for the use of telemedicine, which helped support access to abortion and family planning services during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Removing barriers: It also recommend removing medically unnecessary political barriers to safe abortion, such as criminalisation, mandatory waiting periods before receiving a requested abortion, third-party authorisation for abortion, restrictions on which health workers can provide abortion services.
- Such barriers can lead to critical delays in accessing treatment and put women and girls at greater risk of unsafe abortion, stigma and health complications, while increasing barriers to education and their ability to work.
Enabling environment: An enabling environment is the foundation of quality comprehensive abortion care. The three cornerstones of an enabling environment for abortion care are:
- Respect for human rights including a supportive framework of law and policy.
- Availability and accessibility of information.
- A supportive, universally accessible, affordable and well functioning health system.

It will support interested countries to strengthen as well as ensure better implementation of the national policies and programmes which are related to contraception, family planning and abortion services.
The WHO claimed it would prevent more than 25 million unsafe abortions annually.
New guidelines can help provide the highest standard of care for women and girls.

The recently notified Medical Termination of Pregnancy (Amendment) Rules, 2021 has increased the upper limit for termination of a pregnancy from 20 to 24 weeks for certain categories of women.
Termination of Pregnancy: The amended law defines “termination of pregnancy” as a procedure used to terminate a pregnancy by utilizing “medical” or “surgical” methods.
Married as well as unmarried women are allowed to terminate their pregnancy.

Around 15.6 million abortions take place in India every year, but most of these are expected to be unsafe.
As per the National Health and Family Survey (2015-16), only 53% of abortions are performed by a registered medical doctor and the balance is conducted by a nurse, auxiliary nurse midwife (ANMs), dai, family member, or self.
Unsafe abortion is the third largest cause of maternal mortality in India.