BACKGROUND Complications following spontaneous or induced abortion are a major cause of maternal morbidity. To manage these complications, post-abortion care (PAC) services should be readily available and easy to access. Standard PAC treatment includes surgical interventions that are highly effective but require surgical providers and medical centers that have the necessary space and equipment....

A literature review was conducted to determine whether misoprostol is an effective treatment for incomplete abortion and, if so, to recommend an appropriate regimen. All English language articles published before October 2007 using misoprostol in at least one of the study arms were reviewed to determine the efficacy of misoprostol when used to treat incomplete abortion in the first trimester. A...

BACKGROUND There is limited published evidence about the status of HIV among women who have had abortions or suffered from abortion complications. Understanding this connection is critical for building the evidence base and for guiding strategies to manage the sexual and reproductive health needs of women living with HIV. The purpose of this study is to determine whether women who suffered inco...

BACKGROUND The provision of medical abortion continues to rely on routine use of ultrasound to confirm expulsion of pregnancy. However, the absence of ultrasound in most of the health facilities in developing countries and the additional training required to enable providers to use ultrasound is often prohibitive. The purpose of this study was to compare clinical history and physical examinatio...

This study describes 58 cases of legal termination of pregnancy done in the acute gynaecology ward, Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), Nairobi, over a 4 year period. The ward handles 20-40 new cases of incomplete abortion daily. Patients in the midtrimester received extra-amniotic or inter-amniotic prostaglandins (PGF2 alpha). Most of the patients were young, single and primigravid. Most termina...

OBJECTIVE To review published reports of first-trimester medical abortion regimens that do not include mifepristone. METHODS Reports listed in Pubmed and Medline on prospective and controlled trials of the efficacy of misoprostol, alone or associated with methotrexate, for first-trimester abortion were analyzed if they included more than 100 participants and were published since 1990. RESUL...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the immediate adverse events and safety of medical compared with surgical abortion using high-quality registry data. METHODS All women in Finland undergoing induced abortion from 2000-2006 with a gestational duration of 63 days or less (n=42,619) were followed up until 42 days postabortion using national health registries. The incidence and risk factors of adverse events...

Postabortion care has received increasing emphasis as an important intervention to address part of the problem of unsafe abortion. Although a good deal of attention has been paid to improving emergency treatment of abortion complications, the other elements of postabortion care, including providing postabortion family planning services, have received less attention and are rarely found in healt...

BACKGROUND To identify an effective misoprostol-only regimen for the termination of second trimester pregnancy, we compared sublingual and vaginal administration of multiple doses of misoprostol in a randomized, placebo-controlled equivalence trial. METHODS Six hundred and eighty-one healthy pregnant women requesting medical abortion at 13-20 weeks' gestation were randomly assigned within 11 ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of midwives administering misoprostol to women with incomplete abortion seeking post-abortion care (PAC), compared with physicians. DESIGN A multicentre randomised controlled equivalence trial. The study was not masked. SETTINGS Gynaecological departments in two hospitals in a low-resource setting, Kenya. POPULATION Women (n=1094) with incomplete abor...