The situation of legal abortion services in Brazil and the knowledge and practice of health professionals in the prevention of unsafe abortion

• Grant number: 24/04119-7
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health - Public Health
• Principal Investigator: Elisabeth Meloni Vieira
• Grantee: Elisabeth Meloni Vieira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Saúde Pública (FSP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Ana Flávia Pires Lucas D'Oliveira ; Jefferson Drezett Ferreira

Abstract

Despite being legalized and regulated by Technical Norms in the health area, the access to legal abortion in Brazil is still limited. Recent studies have shown that legal abortion have been restricted to the Brazilian state capitals. Many women and girls who could have access to legal abortion are now increasing the statistics of evitable maternal deaths or the childbirth of the under 14-year-old girl. Many with no access to legal abortion probably rely on a clandestine abortion using methods that make it insecure, putting their lives and health at risk, as the high number of hospitalizations due to complications of abortion shows. Therefore, it is possible to understand that the improvement of access to legal abortion can contribute to preventing unsafe abortion. This research Project has two components: one is a survey to study the institutional barriers and the structure of the Referral Services for the Interruption of Legal Laid Down Cases of Pregnancy (RSILLDCP) which impede access to legal abortion as well as to identify deficiencies and technical difficulties. This component will be carried out with health professionals of RSILLDCP. A second component will be developed also with quantitative methods aiming to study the health professionals of Primary Care working in Rio das Ostras city, to assess their knowledge and practices to approach unwanted pregnancy, orientation to unsafe abortion, and the referral to legal abortion when it is needed. In the second component will be included a qualitative study on health professional who give orientation about insecure abortion in order to subsidize to the survey questionnaire. The research instruments will be developed by the research team and data collection will be carried out online or face-to-face. The analysis will be made using descriptive statistics considering simple frequency and central tendencies measures to identify the more prevalent needs of each service. In the second study besides the descriptive statistics we will search for association between variables related with knowledge and practice about the prevention of insecure abortion and the variables age, sex, profession and work place. In the qualitative study, the interviews will be and fully transcribed. The analysis will be done by the understanding of the thematic content, giving emphasis to both the expected and emergent themes. (AU)