Estimating Clandestine Abortion with the Confidants' Method. Results from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Clementine Rossier, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Georges Guiella, Université de Ouagadougou
Abdoulaye Ouedraogo, Université de Ouagadougou
Blandine Thieba, Université de Ouagadougou

Data on illegal abortion in sub-Saharan Africa are rare and non-representative. This study presents a new method to collect quantitative data on clandestine abortion, the confidants' method, applied in 2001 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. According to our estimates, there is 40 induced abortions per 1000 women aged 15 to 49 in Ouagadougou annually, and even more among adolescents (60 per 1000 women 15-19); adverse health consequences affect 60% of women who had an abortion, and 14% enter the city's hospitals, which receive an estimated 1100 abortion complications a year. Hospital data indicate that these centers admit about 1000 induced abortions annually; the age distribution of patients admitted for induced abortion also corresponds to the confidants' method's projections. These two results argue in favor of the reliability of the method. A comparison with similar data collected in rural Burkina indicate that abortion rates increase with the entry into the fertility transition.