Peruvian scientific production on abortion in scopus

Abstract

Unsafe abortion causes a large number of complications and maternal deaths worldwide, and especially in countries where abortion is penalized, and therefore performed almost exclusively under clandestine circumstances, such as in Peru [1] where abortion is only legal when performed by a physician with the approval of the woman when it is “the only measure to save the woman's life or to avoid a severe or permanent damage.” Any other situation is considered as a criminal abortion. In this context, accurate information is needed by policy makers to see the whole picture, which includes the possible consequences of the penalization of abortion. To identify available scientific information in Peru, we performed a search of papers published by Peruvian authors on induced abortion until 2015 in Scopus (one of the most extensive database, which contains scientific journals that have passed certain quality standards, including those that are indexed in Medline), with the terms “aborto” and “abortion,” obtaining 138 results. We reviewed these papers and found that 13 of them had induced abortion as main topic.