What could be harder than being forced from your home by a crisis? One answer: Discovering you have an unintended pregnancy—and that safe reproductive health care is non-existent. This is the traumatic situation many people face in crisis settings. 

But in Bangladesh’s sprawling Rohingya refugee camps, Ipas is training health workers in reproductive health care that includes abortion. And community education ensures women and girls who need an abortion know where to go.

“Ipas gave me the knowledge to make myself useful,” says Ummay Roman Jannaty (above), an Ipas-trained paramedic. 

Ummay provides family planning and abortion care at Friendship Hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. She says many Rohingya women and girls arrived in the refugee camps with little knowledge of sexual and reproductive health. The community education efforts she helps with are changing that. She now sees many women who come for services at the suggestion of their friends or neighbors. 

While the world faced many human conflicts and climate disasters in 2022, Ipas has been leading work to ensure abortion access in crisis settings in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Myanmar.  

When you support Ipas, you make a direct impact on the reproductive freedom of people dealing with the harshest life circumstances. Please donate today to ensure we can continue this bold and crucial work.