Estimating the costs of treating abortion complications and the costs of legal abortion services, Colombia, 2012.

Since 2006, in Colombia abortion is permitted under three limited circumstances. Nonetheless, many women still have limited access to legal abortion. Recent evidence shows that less than 1% of the 400,000 induced abortions in 2008 were legal. Moreover, evacuation by D&C is still the standard of care for abortion services and for treating abortion complications, rather than the WHO-recommended method of MVA. In addition, administrators of health care enterprises are claiming that legal abortion services are a cost burden to the health care system, with no evidence to support their claims. The aim of this study, the first of its kind in Colombia, is to document the comparative costs of a) legal abortion vs. the cost of treating complications due to unsafe abortion, and b) document the costs of using modern (MVA) vs. older (D&C) techniques. Findings will allow us to provide evidence to dispel erroneous allegations associated with the provision of legal abortions, to help remove barriers for accessing safe abortion services, to investigate the extent to which using a modern (MVA) vs. older (D&C) technique represents lower costs to the health system and to fill out the knowledge gaps to deal more directly with barriers to legal abortion services.