KATHMANDU, JANUARY 12

Many women who want to seek safe abortion are not able to do that mainly due to abortion stigma and lack of awareness about safe abortion services.

Advocate Nabin Shrestha, who runs reproductive health rights campaign of Forum for Women, Law and Development, said that many uneducated women from remote areas who were unaware of the legality of abortion and safe abortion practices, were using illegal drugs for abortion.

He said illegal drugs were being imported from India by pharmacies and the government needed to ban imports of such drugs.

Shrestha said local governments had not prepared any directives for health professionals who were trained to provide abortion services to women within nine weeks of pregnancy to provide the same service within 10 weeks of pregnancy. 'New rules stipulate that health professionals can provide abortion service within 10 to 12-weeks pregnancy and in certain cases at any time of the pregnancy.

Those health professionals that were trained to provide service within nine weeks of pregnancy cannot provide service to women who have more than nine weeks of pregnancy,' he said. Shrestha said that local governments were not providing free ambulance services to women seeking safe abortion and that was also a hindrance in enabling women to get safe abortion services.

Senior Programme Officer of Family Planning Association of Nepal Pramij Thapa said that 58 per cent women were not aware about safe abortion rules and practices. Many girls and women are not aware that they can have unwanted pregnancy terminated only within 12 weeks of pregnancy,' he added.

He said the government had started providing abortion services from health posts, but there were neither adequate number of health centres nor adequate number of trained human resources.

A safe abortion rights activist working for MSI Reproductive Choices, Nepal office, said that the government needed to increase fund for ensuring women's reproductive right of which safe abortion service was an important element. 'But the government is not allocating enough fund for save abortion services as it is concentrating on controlling the COV- ID-19 pandemic,' he said and added that the private sector and other stakeholders also needed to help the government provide safe abortion services. The source said that abortion stigma should be removed or else it could adversely impact women, particularly young girls' mental health.

A version of this article appears in the print on January 13, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.