‘Amend law on abortion’
Save Ghana, a Non Governmental Organisation championing reproductive health, has called for the inclusion of induced abortion under the National Health Insurance Scheme.
Speaking at a forum to mark the Global Day of Action for Access to legal and Safe Abortion in Accra, the Executive Director of Save Ghana,Mr Kingsley Kanton, noted that due to fear and victimisation, most abortions were illegally being performed to the detriment of patients.
He said the decision to abort or not should be an individual choice and should not be based on societal coercion or family beliefs.
Mr Kanton ,therefore, called on Parliament to amend the Ghana Abortion Law (1985) to make way for the huge number of women seeking the service under situations not permitted under the current law.
He finally called on the Ghana Education Service to include sexual reproductive health issues in the curriculum of both basic and second cycle institutions as a way of preventing would-be mothers from dying, adding “ there is no shame in having an abortion; it is to look ahead and leap forward; that the only shame is in bringing an unwanted child into the world”.
Making a presentation on behalf of the Minister of Health,the Deputy Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Gloria Quansah Asare, noted that abortion( which is the loss of pregnancy before the foetus is viable) was permissible in three cases under the law.
“The first case is rape, defilement of female idiot and incest, the second case scenario is risk of life, injury to physical or mental health and the third case is substantial risk, serious abnormality or disease”, she noted.
She called on women to desist from resorting to unsafe abortions since this could be inimical to their health status and their womb.
The Government of the Republic of Ghana adopts and adapts the reproductive health definition from the The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. It states,“Reproductive Health is of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity in all matters related to the reproductive system and its functions and processes”.
