There are two safe abortion procedures, endorsed and recommended by the World Health Organization
(WHO) and the International Federation of Gynecobstetrics and Obstetrics (FIGO), for their high rates
of efficacy.
Both procedures allow the termination of unplanned or unwanted pregnancies in a safe way, ensuring the well-being, health, and in many cases social justice, of those who
resort to it.
One of them is medical abortion, i.e. the ingestion of tablets (using the correct dosage
and substances) to induce abortion safely (before 12 weeks of gestation),
by stimulating contractions in the uterus and dilating the cervix simultaneously
, which allows evacuation in the days following the intake.
Efficacy rate. Medical abortion, when used at the recommended dose during
the first 12 weeks of gestation, has an efficacy rate of 95% to 98% with the combined
regimen (misoprostol and mifepristone). Whereas, when misoprostol alone is used at the same
gestational age, it has an efficacy rate of 85%.
Among its advantages is that it is a non-invasive procedure, which can be used at home,
ideally with the accompaniment of trained personnel especially to ensure that the procedure
concluded correctly, however, this accompaniment is not indispensable once the woman
has the correct information.
The other method is vacuum aspiration. It is the first choice procedure recommended
by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Federation of Gynecobstetrics and Obstetrics (FIGO)
as it is a modern, versatile, safe and effective technique to remove the contents of the uterus within
the first 12 weeks of gestation. Uterine evacuation is performed by means of a manual or electric vacuum aspiration equipment
, which has a design similar to that of a syringe.
Efficacy percentage. This method has an efficacy of 98% when the procedure is performed
within the first 12 weeks of gestation, with trained personnel and the correct equipment.
Among its advantages are that it is an outpatient procedure, i.e.: it does not require
hospitalization or admission to the operating room, does not require general anesthesia and concludes once
the clinical maneuver is completed. It must be performed by trained personnel, including professionals from
general medicine, gynecobstetrics, nursing or midwifery.
On the other hand, both methods are recommended to replace the Instrumental Intrauterine curettage
(IUI) or uterine curettage, since this is no longer a procedure endorsed by the World Health Organization
.
In a retrospective case series of 80,437 women seeking induced abortion,
vacuum aspiration was associated with less than half the rate of major and minor complications compared with
LUI (Grimes, Schulz, Cates Jr., & Tyler, 1976). Another more recent series, which included more than
100,000 abortion procedures, found that LUI performed alone or in combination with
vacuum aspiration was significantly more likely to be associated with
complications, particularly incomplete abortion, than vacuum aspiration without curettage
(Sekiguchi, Ikeda, Okamura, & Nakai, 2015).
If you would like to learn more about recommended dosages to provide a safe abortion procedure with
medications
or with
vacuum aspiration,
access our materials created for healthcare professionals to guide
clinical practice and ensure safe procedures for women.
In this
video you will learn from an expert
the advantages of MVA over LUI. If you want to know more about safe and legal abortion,
we invite you to visit our website for health professionals :
http://profesionalesdelasalud.ipasmexico.org/