Safe abortion care saves lives
After 19 years at MSF, *Asha, a midwife from east Africa, shares the challenges, breakthroughs and growth she’s experienced providing lifesaving abortions.
Photo: © Davide Scalenghe
When I started working with MSF as a midwife in 2003, I managed deliveries and newborn care, but I also saw a big need for abortion care. Whenever this need came up, I wanted to help, but I didn’t have that training or experience.
In 2004, I learnt that MSF had adopted a policy stating that we would provide safe abortion care wherever it was needed to prevent maternal deaths and injuries due to complications from unsafe abortions.
Back then, few patients were asking for abortion care. It is a taboo subject in many of the places where MSF works. But a lot of women were suffering in silence because I treated them for complications from unsafe abortions, such as septicemia [blood infection] and severe bleeding. I vividly remember one patient who died, leaving five young children behind.
In 2009, I was finally able to attend an MSF training on sexual and reproductive healthcare, and I was able to start safely providing abortion care myself.
Ready to put my new skills to use, I travelled to my next assignment in West Africa with MSF. But I soon found another obstacle in managing abortions: my team.
Where there is a lack of knowledge about abortion, the response is often: What if the patient dies? We hear stories about women dying after abortions, but that is because the conditions or circumstances of the abortion were unsafe.
Several years later, I attended an MSF workshop called Exploring Values and Attitudes towards Abortion (EVA). It was very educational and changed a lot of perceptions and attitudes. Many of my colleagues simply had not known about the devastating impact of unsafe abortion, and that it kills at least 22,800 women and girls and injures millions more every year.
The first patients who requested safe abortion care after my team attended the EVA workshop had been referred by colleagues. They sent family members, friends and neighbors who needed help; I saw the impact of the EVA workshop immediately.
It’s not always easy but providing safe abortion care is important. Over the 19 years I worked with MSF, I had to be very resourceful to provide this care. It required a lot of confidence and sometimes courage. Listening to women is essential, and that's how I discovered ways to help them even when there were obstacles.
*Name has been changed for privacy