The purpose of this guide is to provide practical advice for health staff undertaking infectious disease preparedness and response activities to ensure that access to safe abortion care (SAC) is maintained when an infectious disease outbreak occurs. It is an operational guide which can serve to support health actors to maintain SAC services during outbreaks and ensure that necessary SAC considerations are integrated within outbreak responses; it is not a clinical guide. The locational focus of this document is humanitarian and fragile settings; however, recommendations may apply to infectious disease outbreaks in all low-resource populations. This guide is intended to complement Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights During Infectious Disease Outbreaks: Operational Guidance for Humanitarian and Fragile Settings.


The target audiences for this guide are program managers and health care providers from governments and implementing partner agencies located in humanitarian and fragile settings that are at risk of, or experiencing, infectious disease outbreaks. This guide may also be useful to other cadres, such as social workers and gender-based violence case managers, who often serve clients with unintended pregnancies.