Cousins, Sophie. "COVID-19 has “devastating” effect on women and girls." The Lancet 396.10247 (2020): 301-302.
Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UN Population Fund, is among experts warning about disrupted health services and a surge in gender-based violence. Sophie Cousins reports.
As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates, fears are increasing about the effect of the pandemic on women's and girls' sexual and reproductive health and their access to care. In response to COVID-19, in March, WHO issued interim guidance for maintaining essential services during an outbreak, which included advice to prioritise services related to reproductive health and make efforts to avert maternal and child mortality and morbidity.
As the pandemic spread, many countries implemented tough lockdowns and travel restrictions in a bid to slow transmission. In doing so, some governments did not heed WHO's advice, and instead forced sexual and reproductive health services to close because these services were not classified as essential. These services include abortion or even, as Human Rights Watch has reported in Brazil, contraception. This decision not only denied women and girls access to time-sensitive—and potentially life-saving—services, but also further distanced them from already difficult-to-access sexual and reproductive health care.
Although numerous countries have now eased restrictions, the effects of travel restrictions, closure of health services, economic hardship, and gender-based violence are already evident. With the pandemic growing in many places, governments have to make difficult decisions about how best to protect the health of their citizens.
Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told The Lancet that she was concerned about the effect COVID-19 was having on women and girls. “In a word, it is devastating. There are many women in situations of desperation right now and all this tallies up to devastating health and social consequences for that woman, for that girl, for that family, for that community”, she said. “We were doing okay, we still needed to accelerate progress, but now here you have a situation where we could actually go backward. It's unacceptable.”
UNFPA predicts there could be up to 7 million unintended pregnancies worldwide because of the crisis, with potentially thousands of deaths from unsafe abortion and complicated births due to inadequate access to emergency care. Kanem added that she was particularly concerned about “the skyrocketing of gender-based violence”, which she said was a “pandemic within a pandemic and it's very much on my mind”. Read more via the Lancet