A politico-medical perspective of induced abortion in a semi-urban community of Ile-Ife, Nigeria

This study is designed to document a semi-urban community perspective on induced abortion in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, with a view to estimating community awareness, attitudes and implications of its existence in the community and providing relevant sociopolitical policies and pragmatic educational guidelines for policy makers to solve some of its problems within the Nigerian landscape and beyond. This was a cross-sectional study conducted in April 2000, at Oranfe community in Ile-Ife, South West, Nigeria, which has an estimated population of 5250 inhabitants. We used the survey method with the aid of a well-structured questionnaire. One hundred and eighty residents of the community were sampled as our subjects for this study. We used the cluster random sampling technique. The main outcome measures were the sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents, knowledge, attitude with perceived solutions to the problems of abortion and relationship of the sociodemographic factors to respondents' knowledge and attitude. The respondents were highly literate, as only 18 (11·04%) had no formal education. Eighty-five (52·79%) had good knowledge of abortion while 45 (27·95%) and 31 (19·25%) had fair and poor knowledge, respectively. Thirty-eight (24·05%) respondents felt that the solution to the problems of induced abortion can be obtained through its legalisation; 31 (19·62%) respondents believed that the solution lies in liberalising laws on abortion; provision of safe abortion services was suggested by 30 (18·98%) respondents. One hundred and seven (66·88%) felt that legalisation of abortion will increase its practice while 53 (31·12%) felt that such legalisation will not increase the practice. Similarly, 55 (34·37%) of the respondents emphasised that legalisation would reduce the problems of induced abortion compared with 82 (51·25%) who felt otherwise. One hundred and twenty (73·61%) of the respondents did not believe that the position of the law in Nigeria can stop the practice of induced abortion. Solving the problems of induced abortion in Nigeria requires pragmatic and non-hypocritical sex educational policies, which are widely embracing to sensitise people in the community through public enlightment programmes.