DIRECTOR of health promotion in the Ministry of Health, Dr Kevin Harvey, has supported a call by Youth Minister Lisa Hanna for a review of the contentious anti-abortion law.

Hanna, during her contribution to the Sectoral Debate last Tuesday, lamented that the abortion issue has been on the discussion table for 40 years and declared that the debate needs to be reopened given the increase in the availability of illegal abortion, services and the number of women and girls having abortions.

Speaking at the reopening of the Lenworth Jacobs Clinic and launch of the Population Services Jamaica at the Jamaica Family Planning Association on East Street in downtown Kingston last Thursday, Dr Harvey said the concerns warrant urgent action.

“As a physician, I have seen every day where women and girls are coming to me, talking about abortion and I have seen where there have been a marked increase in abortion services not provided through proper health care services,” Dr Harvey disclosed.

“There is phenomena where certain pills can be accessed and are being used, and I have seen many women coming into my office bleeding as a result of this and having issues and the hospitals are also complaining,” he added.

In 2011, the health ministry reported that the number of women seeking post-abortion care at public hospitals had declined even as the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported a significant jump in the number of unsafe abortions across the globe.

According to the data supplied by the ministry, 13 women sought post-abortion care at state-run hospitals, including the University Hospital of the West Indies in 2009, down 43 per cent from 23 in 2005.

Conversely, the WHO — in its 2011 publication on unsafe abortion — stated that unsafe abortions in Latin America and the Caribbean rose from 3.9 million in 2003 to 4.2 million in 2008, with Jamaica and other Caribbean countries accounting for an estimated 100,000 cases in 2003 and 170,000 cases in 2008 — a 70 per cent rise.

Last Thursday, Dr Harvey underscored the importance of integrating family planning and sexual transmitted infections prevention services.

He said many of the hundreds of young teen girls delivering babies on an annual basis do not have access to contraceptives without their parents’ intervention.

Added to that, he said the majority of people affected by HIV were between 15 and 35 and that girls between 15 and 19 were more at risk than their male counterparts.

“So you can clearly see that there is a link between access to family planning, condom, pills, inserts, etc, and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases not just HIV but gonorrhoea, chlamydia and some of the others,” Dr Harvey said.

However, he said that steps have already been taken to link the two, hence the move to merge the National Family Planning Board with the National HIV Response to form the National Family Planning Board Sexual Reproductive Health Authority.

“This in itself won’t solve the problem, but if we can achieve sexually reproductive health programme integration at the service delivery level where a person accessing HIV testing can also access family planning, and for those who are going to ante-natal and post-natal clinics can also receive intervention to prevent HIV transmission, then certainly we would start moving much further and faster in reducing impact of unplanned births in our population,” he emphasised.

Meanwhile, St Rachel Ustanny, chief executive officer of the Jamaica Family Planning Association, said that the association is seeking partnerships to increase its family planning clinics from three to 14 by 2020.

“The aim is to increase access to quality sexual and reproductive health care, to reduce maternal deaths, to increase knowledge awareness and decision making skills among beneficiaries, and to encourage critical thinking on sexuality issues,” she said.

She, too, stressed the need for the country to take a muti-faceted approach to address key sexual and reproductive issues, including high maternal mortality rate, increasing HIV infection rate among teenagers, high pregnancy rates, large number of young woman treated for abortion, high rates inter-generational sex, and youth rape.

Julia Roberts, deputy regional director, Latin America and the Caribbean, Population Service International — which was instrumental in the relaunch of the clinic — renewed her organisation’s support and commitment to the association.

Population Services International is a non- profit social marketing organisation that utilises private sector partnership and techniques to work with and serve the public sector.