The Chair of the Bixby Center Professor Ndola Prata, MD, MSc and her DrPh candidate Blake Erhardt-Ohren presented research from their collaborative projects at the African Population Conference in Lilongwe, Malawi.
First project
Title: What happens to abortion rights for refugees in Africa when they cross borders?
Description: 25% of refugees are at risk of pregnancy and refugees have a higher unmet need for reproductive health services than other populations. We investigated the impact of forced displacement on African refugees' legal access to abortion. We used refugee UNHCR data and the Center for Reproductive Rights' abortion law data. We assigned each country an abortion law category between 5 (abortion prohibited altogether) and 1 (abortion on request). Out of 6,860,398 female refugees aged 12-59 years who sought asylum in 2022, 32% migrated within Africa. 23% sought asylum in countries with more restrictive laws, 41% sought asylum in countries with similar abortion laws, and 36% sought asylum in countries with less restrictive laws. These results point to the need for more funding, guidance, and support to humanitarian response actors to provide access to safe abortion and post-abortion care services wherever they implement other services due to the complex legal landscape refugees experience during displacement.
Second project
Title: Do Restrictive Abortion Laws Affect the Severity of Abortion-Related Morbidities in Africa?
Description: In collaboration with colleagues from the WHO, we investigate whether the severity of abortion-related morbidities differs across countries with varying degrees of abortion restrictions in sub-Saharan Africa. This cross-sectional prospective study abstracted 13,657 medical records from women presenting to 210 facilities in the WHO MCS-A. We classified each country's abortion laws into four categories: abortion on request, to preserve health, to save a life, prohibited altogether. We compare patient’s characteristics with severe and non-severe abortion complications across countries with dissimilar levels of abortion law restrictiveness; and run a multivariable model exploring associations between the severity of abortion-related morbidity and the restrictiveness of the law within and across African countries. We use post-model estimations to explore predictive probabilities of abortion severity: by country, region, and for significant covariates in the model. Results of this research will be useful to policymakers, advocates, and government officials interested in reducing preventable maternal morbidity, near misses, and deaths due to abortion complications.
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