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From Isaac Job, Uyo
Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre (WARDC) has urged the Akwa Ibom State Government to implement safe abortion law to reduce maternal morbidities and mortalities.
The organisation said the National Health Demographic Survey report (2018) places Akwa Ibom as the state with the highest number of maternal mortality of 420 deaths per 100,000 live births.
The law also known as ‘Abortion SToP Guideline’ was passed into law in 2018 and adopted by the Akwa Ibom State Government in 2024 as part of its Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) intervention initiative.
The Abortion SToP Guidelines provides legal grounds, information and conditions for the termination of pregnancy likely to lead to the death of pregnant women in the country.
State Coordinator, Gynaecologist Association of Nigeria, Dr. Abbah Mathias Gabriel, during his keynote speech at the WARDC’s one-day roundtable discussion at the weekend in Uyo, urged states, especially Akwa Ibom, to implement the Abortion SToP Guideline.
Speaking to our reporter on the sidelines of the workshop, Dr. Gabriel said: “The guideline is on the safe termination of unsafe pregnancy with legal indicators.
“The sub-headline is an offshoot of the national SToP guideline which was to improve on the Nigerian laws pertaining to safe abortion. These laws are both in the criminal code in the North and in the South.
“The law is to inform people on the possible effective conditions that can demand the termination of pregnancy legally. The aim is to actually reduce the number of women suffering from the complications of poorly performed termination of pregnancy, what we call unsafe abortion.
“Included in this also is the training of personnel to handle this matter. Nigeria came up with the SToP Guideline in 2018 and Akwa Ibom adopted it in 2024.
“Unfortunately, the Guideline is not circulated well enough for people to know that there are legal indicators for termination of pregnancy to prevent morbidities and mortalities.
“The purpose of the guideline is to provide legal conditions for termination of pregnancy that endangers the life of pregnant women; not social termination of pregnancy. It is also to protect the baby.”
Also speaking, a director with WARDC, Mrs. Mary-George Gbemilola, explained that the roundtable discussion was to create awareness on sexual reproductive health rights.
“At this level, we want to see some of the states that have the safe pregnancy guideline. We want to see how far in terms of implementation. We want to see accountability because there are a lot of deaths around women; maternal mortality.
“We want to see how we can engage the state governments to see how they can assist to reduce the number of women dying during childbirth and women dying as a result of unsafe abortion.
“We are embarking on monitoring and evaluation to see where we are and how to close the gap and how to meet up with different developmental approaches in communities,” she said.
