SELF-MANAGED ABORTION – Understandings of self-managed abortion as health inequity, harm reduction and social change

by JN Erdman, K Jelinska, S Yanow

Reproductive Health Matters, September 2018

This commentary explores how self-managed abortion (SMA) has transformed understandings of safe abortion and associated health inequities, from three perspectives: SMA as health inequity, SMA as harm reduction, and SMA as social change, including health system innovation and reform. This more dynamic understanding can both improve the design of interventions in the field, and more radically, reset goals for reform of health systems and other state institutions towards the full realisation of sexual and reproductive health and human rights.