Concern expressed about risky abortions
Women and teenagers continue to seek non-supervised terminations.
MARK Steele, a member of the provincial legislature, the Democratic Alliance (DA) Ugu Constituency head and the alternate spokesman of health, has expressed concern about the high level of risky pregnancy terminations in the Ugu District.
He pointed out that figures provided by KwaZulu-Natal Health MEC, Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo, showed women and teenage girls within the district continued to take risks when it came to seeking non-supervised terminations of pregnancy. Dr Dhlomo was responding to questions posed by the DA.
According to Dr Dhlomo, some 225 women and girls reported to Murchison Hospital with post-abortion complications during 2013. During the same period 267 went to the Port Shepstone Regional Hospital for the same reason. For the first quarter of this year, the figures were 55 for Murchison and 61 for Port Shepstone.
Hospital authorities could not say for sure how many of these cases were spontaneous abortions and how many were illegal terminations. Patients did not always give their correct personal history on admission forms. Nurses were also understandably reluctant to question a patient aggressively as they had to respect patient autonomy.
The health department was, however, confident that if any illegal terminations were being offered they were being done in a relatively safe way, mostly by giving the patient an abortion-inducing drug.
The main concern was about how many pregnant women resorted to making unsupervised use of abortion-inducing drugs supplied by backstreet providers without medical training. “Medical authorities can only do so much,” said Mr Steele.
He called on families, communities and schools to provide pregnant teenage girls with information and support rather than rejecting them and forcing them to seek solutions outside the care of responsible health practitioners.
