A literature review of the determinants of unsafe abortion in Botswana; recommendations for the minister of Health to tackle this problem.
Exam number: 1054
Word count: 2595 Introduction
The democratic Republic of Botswana, a middle income country in Southern Africa, has a population of about 2 million people.1 With a land size of around 600.000 square kilometers, it has a very low population density.2 Botswana was a British colony until its independence in 1966. For several decades, Botswana’s economy has been one of the fastest growing of Africa. This is mainly due to the diamond mining industry.2 The GDP of Botswana in 2013 was almost 15 billion US$.1
Despite the decline of the total maternal mortality ratio, the practice of unsafe abortions is still present in Botswana and contributes to the
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This is very likely attributable to the restrictive abortion law, leading to underreporting of illegal abortion due to fear of prosecution.
The Central statistics Office of Botswana has published the causes of maternal mortality deaths. 6 In figure 1 you see the statistics of death causes that could be due to unsafe abortions.
Obviously, woman who undergo unsafe abortions and are not admitted to the hospital will never be registered.
WHO has estimated the numbers of unsafe abortion in 2008; in Southern Africa, the unsafe abortion rate was 9 per 1000 women. Per 100.000 unsafe abortion performed, 360 women died due to complications.7
Women how undergo unsafe abortion are often young women with a low socio-economic status, low education and less autonomy about their reproductive rights. U, HH, II, DD, M, 20, 14, Q
Botswana in ranked as a country with the third highest prevalence of HIV in the world, namely 21.9%. However, studies have shown that there is no difference in the number of pregnancy termination between HIV positive and HIV negative women.