But for the vast majority of Nigeria’s women, abortion and other forms of reproductive health care — such as contraceptive provision — remain elusive. While less than 10 percent of married women use modern contraceptive methods, a staggering number of women appeal to unqualified abortion providers and die at home or in the country's underresourced hospitals.

Though it’s difficult to track and identify deaths related to unsafe abortion, the Society of Gynaecology and Obstetrics of Nigeria estimates that about 20,000 adolescents and women perish each year from such causes.  With little or no sexuality education, young girls are at greatest risk for becoming an unsafe abortion casualties; 140,000 hospital admissions for abortion complications occur each year, and more than half of those patients are teenagers.  

Like many developing countries, Nigeria is characterized by high fertility rates, vast unmet needs for family-planning services, urban-rural disparities and spotty health-care infrastructure.

In addition to these problems, restrictive legislation has contributed to Nigeria’s maternal mortality rate, one of the world’s highest with 800 women dying per 100,000 live births. The country is roughly divided into the mostly Muslim north and the predominately Christian south, which are separated by different criminal codes. Although throughout the nation abortion is only allowed to save the life of the woman, i n some instances, the south’s Criminal Code has been interpreted more broadly to allow abortion to preserve the mental health of a woman.

• Women’s access to postabortion care (PAC)
• Abortion services where legal
• Manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) and technological advances in abortion care
• Vital reproductive health care, including postabortion or postpartum family planning, which can prevent unwanted pregnancies and, ultimately, unsafe abortions.

Ipas Nigeria’s multipronged approach has included successfully urging teaching hospitals to include PAC in medical interns’ education and training community health workers to identify and refer PAC patients to facilities capable of treating them. With model training centers across the nation, Ipas Nigeria is guaranteeing that health systems are staffed with workers equipped to handle patients suffering from unsafe abortion complications.

In this country where the supply of physicians is dwarfed by a population of more than 130 million, Ipas Nigeria has been instrumental in expanding PAC to nurse-midwifery schools. Today, all such facilities incorporate this vital component of reproductive health care in their curricula — a marked change from the past in which nurse-midwives received no pre-service PAC training.   

In addition to widening the availability of PAC, Ipas Nigeria strives to foster a collaborative environment in which NGO and government partners actively address unsafe abortion as serious public-health problem. Through its efforts, faith-based and civic organizations, including the National Council of Women’s Societies, have now also become engaged in the campaign against this major cause of death for the country’s women and girls.

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