Providing Urgent Reproductive Healthcare Worldwide

In Sierra Leone, a struggling mother of two named Christiana sought an abortion from the only source she knew. Untrained, the man perforated her uterus and she left bleeding and in pain. At home, her condition worsened. Remembering an ad for MSI Reproductive Choices, Christiana found her way to the center. The certified doctors at MSI helped her with life-saving care and contraceptives to prevent future pregnancies. Christiana survived, but many young girls and women aren’t as lucky. Safe, quality reproductive healthcare is out of reach. 

“People care about the world’s women and girls, but don’t realize that access to reproductive healthcare is needed to save lives,” says Lucy Valentine Wurtz, MSI’s West Coast Director of Philanthropy. MSI is one of the world’s largest providers of contraception, safe abortions, and maternity care, serving 94,000 women like Christiana every day.

MSI is devoted to providing access to quality care in 36 countries. They focus on women living in poverty, as well as adolescents and women living in remote areas of Africa and Asia. They provide services through facilities in urban centers, partnerships with public and private health workers, their own brands of contraception, and hundreds of outreach teams that travel to communities beyond the road’s end. In fact, MSI outreach teams are famous for climbing mountains, fording rivers, and traveling for days to reach into remote pockets where other healthcare providers never go. Without MSI, the women in these tiny villages would not have this vital care. 

“We approach the challenge of reproductive healthcare access from many different angles to achieve our goals to end unsafe abortion and make contraception available to every woman who wants it,” says Wurtz. 

For 257 million women worldwide, choice is impossible. They cannot access their chosen contraception. The ramifications can be staggering. In most of the countries where MSI works, pregnancy related causes kill more young women than anything else. 

There are other implications, too. In sub-Saharan Africa, four million teenage girls are forced out of school every year because of pregnancy, says Wurtz. Fewer than 5% will go back. This starts a cycle of poverty that is difficult to escape. The effects are generational and tragic when you consider how inexpensive it is to provide a girl with contraception.

“Access to life-saving reproductive care is not that complex,” says Wurtz. “We have the solution and it’s scalable. We just need the funding.”