Millions of women lose contraceptives, abortion access amid COVID-19
1 / 3Virus Outbreak Women in LockdownPeople walk along a downtown street in Johannesburg, South Africa, Monday, March 16, 2020. Millions of women and girls globally have lost access to contraceptives, abortion services and related care because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now the first widespread measure of the toll says India with its abrupt, months-long lockdown has been hit especially hard.
Related: How COVID-19 is impacting health care access for women of colorThe World Health Organization this month said two-thirds of 103 countries surveyed between mid-May and early July reported disruptions to family planning and contraception services. The U.N. Population Fund warns of up to 7 million unintended pregnancies worldwide.
“I’ve never seen anything like this apart from countries in conflict,” said Diana Moreka, a coordinator of the MAMA Network that connects women and girls to care across 16 African countries. Calls have increased to their hotlines, including those launched since the pandemic began in Congo, Zambia and Cameroon. More than 20,000 women have called since January.
In India’s megacity of Mumbai, one woman was unable to find a pregnancy testing kit after the lockdown started in March, and then couldn’t find transport to reach care in time, said Dr. Shewetangi Shinde, who attended to her in a public hospital. By then, medical abortion wasn’t an option since the pregnancy was too advanced.
In January, India began amending laws to allow certain women to obtain abortions up to 24 weeks instead of 20. But the pandemic interrupted it.
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The Other Crisis: Millions Worldwide Have Lost Access to Abortion and Contraceptives Due to COVID-19While many elected officials in the United States have used the covid-19 pandemic to quietly push for anti-abortion legislation, the rest of the world suffers from a scarcity of contraception and abortion resources. The situation is dire. A new report from Marie Stopes International found that between January and June, across 37 countries, 2 million fewer women received reproductive healthcare than during the same time period the previous year. India accounts for 1.3 million of those women. (Abortions are considered essential services under India’s months-long lockdown, but most women were not informed of the clause.) The study anticipates that the lack of reproductive healthcare during this period will cause 1.5 million unsafe abortions, 900,000 unwanted pregnancies, and 3,000 deaths.
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