Women’s perception about accessibility of safe abortion care services at selected public institutions in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Abstract Background Ethiopia ratified its abortion law in 2005, primarily to reduce the incidence of unsafe abortion and the availability of safe abortion services has increased. However, service availability has not led to a significant reduction in unsafe abortion.Objective The aim of this study was to assess women’s perception about accessibility of safe abortion care services at selected public institutions in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.Method Institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 432 women of reproductive age who work in non-health related public institutions. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. Data were entered into Epi-data and cleaned and exported to SPSS version 24.0 for data analysis. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, independent-sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and linear regression. Statistical significance was set at 5%. Multi-categorical independent variables were dummy coded before entering into the models. Results In this study, more than half (60.2%) of the participants reported that they had pregnancy at least once. Seventy eight respondents (18.1%) had history of previous miscarriage, among these the greater number (74.4%) has happened due to spontaneous abortion. Among the respondents studied, 283 (65.5%) of them have heard of abortion care and media was the major source of information. Closely half of (46.2%) the females who had miscarriage history were treated at governmental health institutions; followed by private clinics (35.9%) and traditional methods (6.4%). Whereas, 11.5% of them didn’t get any abortion care service. There was significant difference in mean scores of participants faced post abortion complications and treated at traditional healer, and particularly the respondents attended traditional healer makes the strongest unique contribution to explaining the perception score.Conclusion Over the past two decades, the safe abortion services has advanced and expanded increasingly in Ethiopia. However, this study indicated that significant number of women still unheard about accessibility of the safe abortion care and attending the traditional and risky procedure of care. There is an urgent need for the government and other stakeholders to provide more awareness on the accessibility and advantage of safe abortion services in the community.