First trimester abortions are just as safe when performed by trained nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives as when conducted by physicians, according to a new six-year study led by University of California, San Francisco, UCSF..

The study published in the American Journal of Public Health comes a week before the 40th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States.
Currently in the United States, a patchwork of state regulations determines who can provide abortions, with several states specifically prohibiting non-physician clinicians from performing the procedure.
The new study was designed to evaluate the safety of early aspiration abortions when performed by nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives trained in the procedure.
Legal waiver
The study was conducted under a legal waiver from the Health Workforce Pilot Projects Programme, a division of the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. California law requires a legal clarification about who can perform aspiration abortions.
The researchers report that the results show the pool of abortion providers could be safely expanded beyond physicians to include other trained health care professionals.
They found that nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives and physician assistants can provide early abortion care that is clinically as safe as physicians. They also found that outpatient abortion is very safe, whether it is provided by physicians or by nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives or physician assistants.
Nationally, 92 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester but studies find that black, uninsured and low-income women continue to have less access to this care, according to the researchers.
In California, 13 percent of women using state Medicaid insurance obtain abortions after the first trimester. Because the average cost of a second trimester abortion is substantially higher than a first trimester procedure and abortion complications increase as the pregnancy advances, shifting the population distribution of abortions to earlier gestations may result in safer, less costly care, according to the research team.
source www.revealzone..com

Its a first trimester abortion whose mainstay of management is medical....which has to be early anyway..this can be done by anyone who knows d correct dosages and combinations...but as for surgical abortions...most nurses that have tried it end up sending dying victims to the doctors. go check!

@Dr9ce,must you comment in every post that has to do with nurses? Haba!I tire for your life o.

Doc, where is your statistics, doctors don't make mistake or what? If you don't have any constructive comment then get the hell out or make some reasonable comment. Nobody is usurping the duty of a doctor here, they are just trying to get health care to the rural population. Midwives are being trained to conduct CS in mozambique to curtail their maternal and infant mortality rate which is not even as high as it is in Nigeria, and they are doing perfectly.
Doctors are delegating a lot of their duty to other medical workers and when you continue doing so the professionals in question will find a way to legalise it making it their own. It seems very soon primary care physicians won't have much say again if nurse practitioners, physician assistants and nurse midwives are given this long rope. Certified nurse anaesthetist and anaesthesiologist are rubbing shoulders doing the same job, the only difference is one is a doctor while the other is a nurse both qualified according US boards. You just choose who you want.
In rural areas where the services of a doctor is require and he is no where to be found the next available qualified professionals are the ones mentioned in the article above, with the study saying that the procedure is safe with them, i do not see the reason why they shouldn't continue.