Expanding access to legal, comprehensive abortion care in Ethiopia has led to a significant decrease in maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion.
Safe and legal abortion care is crucial for saving women’s lives in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia’s maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion has decreased since the country liberalized its abortion laws in 2005.
PAI fights for the permanent repeal of the Global Gag Rule through advocacy and research.
Despite the fact that abortion is legal in the United States and an internationally recognized right, U.S. policies like the Global Gag Rule threaten the availability of safe abortion care for women and girls around the world. Through our advocacy and research, PAI is making the case for the policy’s permanent repeal by arming our allies in Congress with direct evidence of its devastating impacts. We also help our global partners navigate this complicated policy and support grantees who are advocating with their own governments to make their health care systems less reliant on foreign assistance and its resulting harmful policies.
PAI is making the case for the Global Gag Rule’s permanent repeal by arming our allies in Congress with direct evidence of its devastating impacts.
Countries
More than 60 countries around the world impacted by the Global Gag Rule
The Global Gag Rule undermined Ethiopia's progress on reducing maternal deaths due to unsafe abortion.
In 2005, Ethiopian advocates and health providers scored a victory for women and girls when they helped secure a more liberal abortion law that decriminalized the procedure and expanded the circumstances under which it is allowed. Improved access to legal, comprehensive abortion care and an increase in the number of people using family planning have led to a decline in maternal deaths from unsafe abortions.
As one reproductive health professional in Ethiopia told PAI, “When [the government] pushed through safe abortion care, women stopped dying.”
The Ethiopian government, public health experts and civil society know that legal, safe abortion care is critical to saving lives. But the Trump-Pence administration’s expanded Global Gag Rule (GGR) undermined Ethiopia’s progress on reducing maternal deaths due to unsafe abortions by cutting out critical providers from receiving U.S. global health funding.
Under the policy, qualified and trusted health professionals are prevented from providing safe and legal abortion services, including giving patients full and accurate information about their pregnancy options. It further blocks advocates from working with their governments to improve national abortion laws and policies.
The GGR forces foreign organizations to choose between receiving U.S. global health funding and providing comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care to the people they serve. This has led to the closure of clinics and mobile outreach programs that are the trusted — and sometimes sole — sources of family planning and other reproductive health services for marginalized groups in Ethiopia, particularly youth and hard-to-reach rural communities.
The GGR has also damaged long-standing partnerships between health care providers and impeded their ability to integrate sexual and reproductive health services with other vital programs, such as nutrition counseling, HIV testing and maternal health screenings.
The United States is the largest global health donor to Ethiopia and has helped build up and strengthen the country’s health systems. But the GGR is rolling back those achievements, including the country’s own domestic efforts to save women’s lives through progressive abortion policies. In our Access Denied reports, PAI has documented the harmful impacts the policy is having in countries like Ethiopia, giving our allies in Congress direct evidence of the policy’s consequences and strengthening the case for its permanent repeal.
When [the government] pushed through safe abortion care, women stopped dying.Interview from Access Denied Ethiopia