Introduction:

Every day thousands of Asian women driven by desperation, poverty and social stigma seek help from unskilled providers, or quacks, to end unplanned pregnancies. Every day more than 100 such women--many of them young girls just beginning their lives--die as a result. Tens of thousands more suffer life-long disabilities. In Asia, unsafe abortion accounts for 12 percent of all maternal, or pregnancy-related, deaths and claims the lives of 38,000 women each year, according to the World Health Organization.

By liberalizing restrictive abortion laws and allocating resources toward providing safe abortion services, governments can save the lives of tens of thousands of women every year. Unsafe abortion has reached such epic proportions in Asia that political will and civil society efforts need to be synergized to adequately address this issue.

To ensure reproductive and sexual health and reduce maternal morbidity and mortality, one of the most achievable interventions is to ensure that safe abortion services must be in place.

Medical abortion using a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, or misoprostol alone has the potential to meet the needs of millions of women for a safe and affordable way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Asian countries like India and China are globally the largest producers of the Medical Abortion pill, yet public health programmes in Asia do not provide this on their drug schedule or programmes. Professional also sometimes lack the knowledge about how to use them and thus medical abortion is not accessible to the vast majority of women throughout the world who could benefit from it.

Organizational History:

The International Consortium for Medical Abortion (ICMA) was formed in 2002 as a platform for advocacy, debate and dialogue for promoting access to medical abortion worldwide, within the context of safe abortion. Since its founding, ICMA has had a major impact on the field.

In March this year, 37 participants from 13 countries met in Kuala Lumpur and formed the Asia Safe Abortion Partnership (ASAP), facilitated by ICMA. This network has members from Turkey, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mongolia, India, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia.

At present there is no such group in Asia and we hope to create south-south capacity building, and be in a position to influence regional / global agenda by the credibility of our work. ASAP will be a useful forum for experience sharing and capacity building. Individual members are already doing this but their effectiveness will be improved by being a part of such a group.

Goal:

To promote, protect and advance women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health in Asia by reducing unsafe abortion and its complications and where it is legal, by promoting access to comprehensive safe abortion services.

Objectives:

Membership:

Members of the partnership will be organizations and individuals that agree with the goal and objectives of the partnership and are, or intend to be, active in promoting or supporting access to comprehensive safe abortion services, including medical abortion.

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