Unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death, and the only one that is completely preventable. Yet over 30 million unsafe abortions occur each year, leading to at least 28,000 deaths and millions of serious complications—nearly all in low- and middle-income countries. MSF teams see these tragic consequences first-hand, treating thousands of patients every year with severe, potentially life-threatening effects from unsafe abortion. So in 2016 we launched a program to systematically implement safe abortion care (SAC), starting with ten pilot sites and then applying the lessons learned to scale up at projects across the globe. This Collection presents highlights of these efforts. Since our first publication on the need to provide SAC as a way of reducing maternal death and injury, several studies assessed the role of unsafe abortion in driving this suffering in specific contexts. Others described internal obstacles to providing SAC, operational solutions developed, and outcomes achieved. And we advocated for shifting towards community-led and self-managed SAC, particularly given new obstacles that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Complex humanitarian emergencies and other low-resource settings can be exceedingly difficult places to provide quality mental health (MH) care. Yet these environments also often have a high burden of mental health care needs. This collection presents a set of articles describing how MSF teams have adapted and evaluated ways of bringing clinically impactful MH care to neglected communities and patients—from forcibly displaced populations in northern Nigeria to Syrian refugees in Lebanon and typhoon survivors in the Philippines. It also highlights work on developing new tools for providing clinical supervision and for identifying those patients most in need of care in fragile settings, and on new approaches to delivering MH services during the Covid-19 pandemic.