The World Health Organisation (WHO) is calling for more non-physician medical staff and pharmacists to be trained in abortion procedures and for restrictions to be enacted against allowing conscientious objection to abortion.
In a newly released paper on ‘Health worker roles in providing safe abortion care and post-abortion contraception’, the WHO suggests that extending training in terminations, to nurses and midwives, for example, would serve to eliminate a shortfall in trained medical professionals for early-term abortions. The WHO goes on to warn that without implementation of its recommendation in this regard, the world will see a shortage of 12.9 million ‘abortion-ready’ doctors by 2035.
In addition to the shortfall ‘solutions’, the WHO also recommends that women be facilitated to undertake self-assessment and self-induced abortions, forgoing the need for a trained physician. “Such approaches can be empowering for women,” the paper asserts.
On the issue of doctors refusing to perform abortions on the grounds of conscience, the authors of the WHO paper examine this issue – offering their findings as an addendum online – and list such issues as religious and moral objections, a discomfort in dealing with formed foetuses in second-trimester abortions, and concerns around sex-selective terminations. The WHO deals with such concerns by recommending simply: “Conscientious objection, where allowed, should be regulated.”
The Centre for Family and Human Rights in New York has criticised the WHO for its latest paper, insisting that it “not only jeopardises women by lowering medical standards, it also threatens the conscience rights of nurses, midwives, and other non-physician health care providers”.