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Health warnings about complications related to Zia virus significantly increased demand for abortions in Latin American countries, according to a new study.
However, in many of these countries, abortion is either illegal or highly restricted, leaving pregnant women with few options and potentially driving women to use unsafe methods, access abortion drugs without medical supervision or visit underground providers, said researchers at University of Texas at Austin in the US and University of Cambridge in the UK.
On November 17 last year, the Pan American Health Organisation (PA HO) issued an alert about the Zika virus in Latin America.
Although the virus, spread by mosquitoes, causes only mild symptoms, it can have serious complications for unborn children, ranging from eye and hearing defects through to microcephaly (abnormally small heads) and other severe foetal brain defects.
Following the PAHO alert, several countries issued health advisory warnings, including urging women to avoid pregnancy.
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For several years, one option for women seeking an abortion in Latin America has been Women on Web, a non-profit organisation that provides medical abortion outside the formal health-care setting through online telemedicine, in countries where safe abortion is not universally available.
Researchers analysed data on requests for abortion through the website between January 1, 2010 and March 2 this year, in 19 Latin-American countries, assessing whether requests for abortion increased beyond expected trends following the PAHO alert.
They found that in almost all of the countries that had issued health warnings about Zika and had legal restrictions on abortions, the number of requests for abortion through Women on Web rose significantly - effectively doubling in Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela, and increasing by over a third in most of the other countries.
In countries that had issued no health warnings, there was no statistically-significant increase.
"Accurate data on the choices pregnant women make in Latin America is hard to obtain," Assistant Professor Abigail Aiken from the University of Texas at Austin, said.
"If anything, our approach may underestimate the impact of health warning on requests for abortion, as many women may have used an unsafe method or visited local underground providers," said Aiken.
"The World Health Organisation predicts as many as four million Zika cases across the Americas over the next year, and the virus will inevitably spread to other countries," Dr Catherine Aiken from the University of Cambridge added.
"It is not enough for health officials just to warn women about the risks associated Zika - they must also make efforts to ensure that women are offered safe, legal, and accessible reproductive choices," she said.
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
