Prevailing legal and religious strictures in the region are due to :

• Restrictiveness of the laws
• Conservative culture / environment
• Limited advocacy approaches
• Non supportive attitude of service providers
• Inadequate political support
• Insufficient data

Abortion Law:

13 Arab countries hosting IPPF member association are fitted in the world’s Abortion Law* as following:

I- Permitted to Save a Women’s Life
• Egypt
• Iraq
• Mauritania

II- To Preserve Physical Health (also to save the woman’s life)
• Djibouti
• Jordan
• Morocco

III- To Preserve Mental Health (also to save the woman’s life and physical health)
• Algeria

IV- Socioeconomic Grounds (also to save the woman’s life and physical health and mental Health)
• non

V- Without Restriction as to Reason
• Tunisia**

NB: Bahrain is classified as (without restriction) in the same source but we checked with our member association who informed us that it is classified as permitted to save women’s life.

Situation Analysis: 

Between 1995 and 2000, the 52,565,000 women of reproductive age in the Arab World Region (AWR) experienced more than 59,000,000 pregnancies. Of these, at least 14,000,000 were unintended.

And yet, during the same period of 1995-2000, 7,106,800 million abortions occurred in the region (i.e. more that 50 percent of all unintended pregnancies). Nearly 5 percent of all maternal deaths were due to abortion related complications; about 1,900 deaths per year are due to abortion.

This is a clear indication that despite the prevailing legal and religious strictures, resorting to abortion exists in the region, and it is most probably performed under hazardous conditions.

With the exception of Tunisia, abortion is mostly illegal in the Arab World Region except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.  In Tunisia, abortion is made legal on demand and becomes a right for all women on a single condition: that it is performed by a qualified practitioner during the first three months of pregnancy (Decree-law of September 26, 1973). Beyond this period, abortion may be performed if the pregnancy is life-threatening for the mother, or if the foetus is likely to be born handicapped or with a serious illness. Tunisia has one of the lowest abortion rates in the world.

As yet, none of the AWR’s MAs provide abortion services. The efforts of MAs to combat unsafe abortion have focused on encouraging men and women to use contraceptive methods in order to prevent unwanted pregnancies. It has been a strategy for AWR to advocate for combating unsafe abortion by maximizing access to quality FP services through static service delivery points, mobile clinics and community-based services (CBS). Measures to increase access to quality FP services in the AWR have resulted in an increase in FP users with subsequent prevention of unsafe abortion.

- IPPF AWR has been handling the subject of abortion very carefully taking into consideration the local cultures, laws and regulations. The starting point was establishing the Regional Medical Team (RMT)- to discuss the medico legal aspects of abortion in the AWR, make decisions through its regular biannual meetings regarding what MAs can do in abortion and ensuring that all MAs are involved in abortion related activities to achieve the MAs and the regional strategic plans, all MAs adopted the AWR abortion goal, conducted Regional Workshops in Post Abortion Care (PAC) and advocacy, provided TA to MAs to ensure the integration of PAC in MAs service delivery and developed 4 abortion proposals to be funded.

- All Member Associations included abortion projects in the work plans and budget starting 2005. Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine are implementing capacity building activities to their service providers to integrate Post Abortion Services, conducted advocacy campaign to raise awareness of the communities and decision makers to eliminate unsafe abortion, conducted sensitization meetings to women groups, and (Syria, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania) MAs are conducting local surveys to collect data about abortion to use them for advocacy and policy changes. Most MAs have established local partnerships and AWR is coordinating with IPAS in data collection and information dissemination.

- IPPF AWR will continue to work with the MAs to ensure achieving the regional strategy through capacity building, specific TA, maintaining the RMT meetings and following up its recommendations and strengthening and expanding partnerships with organizations working in abortion.