Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems

In view of the need for evidence-based best practices for providing safe abortion care in order to protect the health and human rights of women, the World Health Organization (WHO) has updated its 2003 publication Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems.

In this process, the WHO standards for guideline development have been followed, including: identification of priority questions and outcomes; retrieval, assessment and synthesis of evidence; formulation of recommendations; and planning for dissemination, implementation, impact evaluation and updating. For the clinical recommendations presented in Chapter 2, evidence profiles related to the prioritized questions were prepared, based upon recent systematic reviews, most of which are included in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. In addition, Chapters 1, 3 and 4 of the original 2003 publication were reviewed and updated to reflect the latest estimates on unsafe abortion worldwide, new literature on the topic of service delivery, and new developments in international, regional and national human rights law. A guideline development group, comprising members of an international panel of experts, reviewed and revised the draft recommendations based on the evidence profiles, through a participatory, consensus-driven process.

The target audience for this guidance is policy-makers, program managers and providers of abortion care. In general, the use of the recommendations should be individualized to each woman, with emphasis on her clinical status and the specific method of abortion to be used, while considering each woman s preferences for care.