By IJEOMA UKAZU
Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre, WARDC, joins other activists around the world to highlight women’s demands for the right to access safe abortion.
The Executive Director, WARDC, Dr. Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi made this known recently at a town-hall meeting and strategy sessions titled, “Women Lives Matter: Abortion in Uncertain Times” in Lagos State pointing that the suspended Guidelines on Safe Termination of Pregnancy For Legal Indications can save the lives of some expectant mothers.
Akiyode-Afolabi said that “Amid growing global crises and uncertainty, we assert that continuing rollbacks, shrinking civic space, and proliferation of false narratives have a negative impact on sexual and reproductive health and rights.”
WARDC with the support of Spotlight Initiative called on stakeholders and experts to support the call to the Lagos State Government to lift the suspension on the guidelines.
WARDC and its partners said this would lead to saving the lives of women in the state, adding that, the Lagos state guideline was declared on June 29, 2022, by the Directorate of Family Health and Nutrition, Lagos State Ministry of Health to build the capacity of medical practitioners to save the lives of pregnant women whose pregnancy continuation is a danger to their lives and physical health.
She adds that Nigeria is contributing between 10 to 13 per cent of the world’s total maternal death rates while unsafe abortions account for 24.7 per cent of the maternal deaths within Lagos.
Akiyode-Afolabi said though the implementation of the guideline was suspended on July 7, it is still being looked into by stakeholders which are advocating that it be resuscitated and implemented as it can save more lives of women caught in the web of deaths from unsafe abortions.
According to her women who can benefit from the guidelines and have safe, legal terminations of pregnancy according to chapter three of the guidelines are pregnant women who may have kidney diseases, blood diseases, obstetrics, and gynecological conditions, heart and vascular conditions, psychiatric and other mental disorders, cancers, amongst other conditions and it has been shown that continuing with the pregnancy against the background of the underlying health challenges could pose danger to the life of the mother.
The guidelines allow for such pregnant women to have pre-procedure and post-procedure care while identifying and treating every complication that may arise from the conditions being treated. The framework gets its legality to carry out such safe pregnancy termination from Section 201 of Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2011 which states that “A medical doctor is not criminally responsible for performing in good faith, with reasonable care and skill a surgical operation on any person for his benefit, or on an unborn child for the preservation of a mother’s life and physical health if the performance of the operation, is reasonable, having circumstances of the case.”
Speaking in an interview with The Abuja Inquirer, Prof Rotimi Akinola: Former President, The Society of Gynaecology and Obstetrics of Nigeria, SOGON, said, “Nigeria has the highest maternal mortality ratio in the world. Women here have a one in 22 chance of dying as a result of pregnancy.
“The last audit that was done in Lagos state and this is uniform everywhere is about 13 percent of those deaths are from unsafe abortion. If women are dying because of unsafe abortion, all you would need to do is to ensure they are not getting pregnant, which means they must use family planning but unfortunately, in Nigeria, the prevalence rate of family planning is very low. While women who want to use contraception don’t have access to it.
“With the suspension of this guideline, it means women will continue to terminate those pregnancies in a clandestine way or unsafely and that means women will continue to die needlessly.”