Ipas is an international, non-governmental organization that increases access to safe abortions and contraception. To this end the organization informs women how to obtain safe and legal abortions and trains relevant partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on how to provide and advocate for these.
History
Ipas was founded in 1973 to aid countries in the reform of their reproductive health services and give them technologies saving lives of the women seeking abortion. In 2009 thanks to Ipas the Indian government has included comprehensive abortion care in their National Health Mission. In 2016, Ipas and the Guttmacher Institute convened a convention on abortion research, focusing on the causes and outcomes of unsafe abortion practices, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2017 Ipas began paying for local family-planning services to provide abortions and made a commitment to donate $10 million to such family-planning and abortion services annually.
Scope of work
Ipas works to improve women's access and right to safe abortion care and reproductive health services by:
Training doctors, nurses, and midwives in clinical and counseling skills for abortion, postabortion care and family planning;
Improving health-service delivery to make abortion safer and more accessible for women and less costly for the health system;
Researching the impact of unsafe abortion and documenting best abortion care practices and policies;
Working with advocates and policymakers around the world to support women’s reproductive rights and increase access to safe and legal abortion services;
Engaging with women and men in their communities to expand their knowledge of reproductive health and reproductive rights;
To aid these tactics, together with other similar bodies, Ipas issued a joint declaration on abortion during the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 in 2019, where the strategy of these organizations is to:
Make abortion, including abortion self-care, safe, legal, available, accessible and affordable by eliminating all laws and policies that restrict or criminalize access;
Comprehensively educate about sex with informed choice and autonomy, contraception and abortion, and links to such services without permission of third-parties;
Increase access to early, quality medical abortion through hotlines, telemedicine and self-care referral systems.
Train and draw providers attention to sexual and reproductive health needs of marginalized groups to ensure equal access to contraception and abortion;
Promote "gender equality" via changing "harmful social and gender norms and stereotypes around sexuality, pregnancy and abortion";
Provide access to emergency contraception, safe abortion services and psycho-social support when needed, especially for all survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.
Areas of focus
In order to achieve their goals Ipas focuses on areas that they see as being key to accomplishing their goals. Some of their key areas of focus include:
Ipas has stated that the Global Gag Rule, also known as Mexico City policy, inflicts suffering on women and girls around the world as it makes it difficult for women to get safe and effective abortions in third world countries, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo former Ipas official Barbara Crane spoke out against this policy,"We need stronger health systems and we need integrated service delivery. One of the problems is that family planning has often been kept separate from the problems is that family planning has often been kept separate from other health service delivery and verticalized, and abortion even more so. How do you break the cycle of unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortion? You need to help women have access to services... All it does is marginalize women who have a clear and desperate need for these services and makes it harder for them to get access and it stigmatizes providers." As of 2019 Ipas has reported that staff in Africa and Asia are reporting back that this policy is having a negative effect on local women to have safe abortions due to lack of information and funding. They have also reported that grantees are uneducated on the ruling and unknowingly accept it, which hinders their work on abortion, which results in grantees are concluding their support with Ipas due to misunderstandings, and Bangladesh stopped providing contraceptives which lead to stock-outs in some private facilities.
