The access to safe abortion services is currently limited because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This way, the crisis situation requires new approaches and the distance services based on modern technologies is one of the opportunities enjoyed by women.
In a response to an inquiry made by IPN News Agency, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Protection says the emphasis during the state of emergency will be placed more on the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and also on the prevention of risky abortions by additionally training family doctors.
According to the Ministry, the health facilities provide both medical abortion and vacuum aspiration and the patient can choose between the two after being counseled by a doctor. But now the surgical method is less accessible and the women with unwanted pregnancies use medical abortion, including from a distance, obeying all the diagnostic and conduct provisions.
For women with unwanted pregnancies under nine weeks, the Reproductive Health Training Center recently launched the first service of medical abortion managed from a distance, through telemedicine. The project is supported by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Protection, which said that this pilot-project was approved by the National Ethics Committee last November and pursues the goal of ensuring access to safe medical abortion services for socially vulnerable groups, including rural women, teenage girls, etc.
“In the current situation, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, when contacts between patients and medical personnel must be limited so as to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, with the family medicine undertaking to supervise and treat patients remotely, at home, when many of the hospitals cannot provide abortion services, being in quarantine, the offering of this possibility to women for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy is an opportunity,” the Ministry says in its response.
The Ministry noted that the ending of pregnancies by telemedicine, from a distance, is not a violation of the legislation as the Law on Reproductive Health provides that the state will ensure each woman’s access to safe methods of ending a pregnancy, in accordance with the regulations of the Ministry of Health. The safe pregnancy termination standards approved by the Ministry of Health regulate the medical abortion procedure that allows taking medicines at home if this is the patient’s choice.
The Ministry said that a working group was set up this February to review these documents and to align them to the most recent recommendations of the World Health Organization. In the reviewed version, the self-managed medical abortion under the guidance of a distance provider is stipulated, but all the national experts are to pronounce on the issue before the new document is adopted.
Statistics show that 10,830 abortions were performed in 2018. These include abortions on medical and social instructions and spontaneous abortions. As many as 7,132 abortions were performed at request. This is 65.6% of all the abortions recorded in 2018.
