2023-12-19 20:05:05
A room where instrumental abortion is performed, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris, December 12, 2023. EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP
A step forward… Really? For months now, abortion providers have been demanding that the possibility of carrying out an instrumental voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) – in other words, in the operating room – be extended to midwives. They could already do so, but only on an experimental basis, since November 2022. The decree finally published in Official newspaperSunday December 17, supposed to mark the expansion of their skills, arouses great excitement.
The alert came from feminist circles and associations of caregivers practicing abortions. The reason, pinned down in a press release released Monday December 18 and entitled “Stop the attacks against instrumental abortion! », appears in the first article of the implementing decree: three, even four doctors, must be able, in the event of a complication, to intervene “on site and within deadlines compatible with healthcare safety requirements”according to the official text.
A doctor competent in instrumental abortion, therefore, a gynecologist-obstetrician and an anesthetist-resuscitator. In case of’“arterial embolization”a necessary intervention during a serious uterine hemorrhage, the decree also mentions the use of doctors “providing training and experience in the practice of these acts” – of the “interventional radiologists” in particular, caregivers say.
“Trompo l’oeil enlargement”
Such criteria were already required during the experimental phase, which involved twenty-six health establishments, but supporters of its generalization hoped, at the next stage, to be able to do without them. “To put so many conditions is to mistreat the profession of midwife. As if they had to prove additional skills”, reacts Sarah Durocher, the president of Family Planning, co-signatory of the press release. For the record, they have been able to perform medical abortions since 2016.
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“One step forward, one step back”, we argue in feminist circles, questioning the government method. Feminist activist Suzy Rojtman, member of the collective Abortion in Europe, women decide, goes so far as to question a “trompe l’oeil enlargement” of the scope of intervention of these professionals.
However, the development seemed understood. After a little over a year of experimentation, the government welcomed, on December 12, this new skill offered to midwives. “A strong response to access difficulties [à l’avortement] observed in certain territories »greeted the Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, following the presentation to the Council of Ministers of the constitutional bill relating to the freedom to resort to abortion.
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