Hazards of birth control pills abuse

KATHMNDU, Jan 31: Nisha (name changed), 17, of Satdobato, Lalitpur was brought to the Maternity Hospital in Thapathali a few days ago following excessive bleeding. She also had high fever and the Post Abortion Care (PAC) unit at the hospital said the level of hemoglobin in her blood was very low.



“We asked her relatives to mange 12 pints of blood immediately,” chief of the PAC unit Jaya Poudel said, “We have already used nine out of the 12 pints of blood on her,” Poudel said Thursday.[break]



Nisha had used abortion pills, Poudel said, from the pharmacy without consultation with a medical practitioner. “After acute pain and excessive bleeding, her family brought her to the hospital,” she said.  Nisha wanted to keep her pregnancy secret from the family and had bought the abortion pills. “When she was brought to the hospital see seemed scared. “We administered her anesthesia and completely removed the fetus,” Poudel revealed.



Nisha is not an isolated case and the PAC unit said more than 160 patients come to the unit every month with complications following use of abortion pills without medical advice. Among them more than 15 percent are unmarried teenagers. “They want to abort unwanted pregnancy through abortion pills but face problems due to lack of proper knowledge about its use,” she said.



“They share the problem with the family only when things go out of control,” she claimed. Doctors say the delay in medical care in such situations may cause several complications with infection in uterus, which may even lead to infertility.



Many women seek abortion services from unauthorized health centers and some even buy contraceptive pills from the pharmacies without any kind of counseling. The tendency of the pharmacies to sell pills without prescription from a medical practitioner is also responsible for the problem. “We keep the patients, who come to us for abortion, under observation for a few days after and also counsel them about the possible side-effects of such pills. But the pharmacies do not tell these things,” she explained.



Recently the Department of the Drug Administration (DDA) has confiscated unregistered contraceptive pills from several pharmacies operating across the country. The report of the DDA also mentions that the pharmacies are selling such medicines without meical prescription which can be life threatening.

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