Addressing young women's abortion needs: Why existing youth-friendly SRH service models are not comprehensive enough

Traditional youth-friendly service models address a wide spectrum of adolescents' SRH needs including gender based violence, teenage pregnancy prevention, contraception, STIs and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. However, despite the fact that adolescent girls have an estimated 2.2 – 4 million unsafe abortions each year, and 46% of the global deaths from unsafe abortion are in women below the age of 24, a recent literature review found no models that included safe abortion care. The literature review, which comprised 75 articles from peer-reviewed journals published in English (1999 – 2009) also revealed that there is a lack of participatory inputs from adolescents in design and evaluation processes. The research findings further showed that evaluations of youth-friendly services models do not take a rights-based approach and few models are designed to guarantee adolescents' and young people's sexual and reproductive rights. This presentation draws on evidence from the literature review to analyze how youth friendly SRH service models have been implemented and evaluated around the world in the past 10 years. In particular, it compares evidence-based evaluations with young people's own perceptions. Conclusions are made around common themes such as stigma as a deterrent to seeking care and youth participation and peer educators as factors of success. It also considers who youth-friendly services actually are for – published research that defines youth-friendly services from the perspectives of young people themselves is scarce, and traditional models that exclude safe abortion care are not meeting the comprehensive SRH needs of young people.