In Hospitals Across Africa, A Lack Of Post-Abortion Care
Some of Onikepe Owolabi's most vivid memories of medical school in her native Nigeria are of the teenage girls she saw in the emergency room of a rural hospital with complications from an unsafe abortion — painful infections that, if left untreated, can lead to permanent disability or even death.
Each time, Owolabi, now a senior research scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive rights organization in the U.S. that supports abortion rights, promptly provided the girls with a group of essential obstetric services known collectively as "post-abortion care," or PAC.
Abortion is illegal in Nigeria except to save a woman's life and carries a heavy jail sentence for both the provider and the patient. But post-abortion care is a form of emergency medicine that all countries have pledged to provide to women with complications of a miscarriage or an induced abortion, irrespective of the legal status of the latter. And many do so with the technical and financial support of the United States.
Indeed, amid the political back-and-forth between Democrats and to describe a public health solution to the problem of unsafe abortion, and U.S. funding for PAC has been permitted under anti-abortion restrictions on U.S. aid. Funding for PAC was even allowed under the Trump administration's , which barred federal global health funding to nongovernmental groups that provide or refer patients for abortions. (That ban was .)
