Abortion care guideline: executive summary, 2nd ed.

13 October 2025

| Executive summary

Overview

The objective of this guideline is to present the complete set of all WHO recommendations and best practice statements relating to abortion. While legal, regulatory, policy and service-delivery contexts may vary from country to country, the recommendations and best practices described in this document aim to enable evidence-based decision-making with respect to quality abortion care.

This guideline updates and replaces the recommendations in the following previous WHO guidelines:

Safe abortion: technical and policy guidance for health systems, second edition (2012)
Health worker roles in providing safe abortion care and post-abortion contraception (previously known as the “task sharing” guidance) (2015), and
Medical management of abortion (2018)

The second edition contains the updated remarks for Recommendation 22. There have been no other changes made to the recommendation itself nor any other recommendations contained in this document.