Arthur Okemba
Abortion Mock Tribunal hears of economic, emotional and physical strains young women endure after unsafe abortions.
As the film rolled, many of those in the room could not hold back tears as young women aged below 28 years narrated the economic, emotional and physical strains they have had to undergo after procuring unsafe abortions.
Sharing their stories behind a mask for fear of being arrested or physically assaulted by their families or anti-abortion groups, they catalogued the difficulties they had to content with after they failed to get access to safe abortion services.
Others narrated tearfully to the audience how they would have avoided the pregnancy in the first place if they had accessed family planning commodities before the sex act or emergency contraceptives afterwards.
The testimonies, which were heard at the recent Abortion Mock Tribunal organized by the Kenya Human Rights Commission, were aimed at bringing to the fore the far reaching effects of unsafe abortion to the individuals, their families, the economy and the social development of many African countries.
Women in other African countries share similar harrowing tales. The main reason for their suffering being lack of funds to address the twin issues of prevention and management of the consequences of unwanted or ill-timed pregnancies
Deborah Okumu, the Director of Kenya Women Political Caucus, says they are now worried that donor money channeled to countries as budget support may not benefit certain critical issues affecting women unless certain conditionalities or mechanisms are put in place.
Governments that do not believe in the reproductive rights of women, particularly on issues such as safe abortion, post-abortion care, and access to reproductive health services for young people may not allocate resources to these areas, says Dr Mary Amuyunzu, a reproductive health expert.
This is more evident in several African countries where the political leadership has refused to allocate resources and enact laws that widen the space for women to enjoy their reproductive rights. Instead they continue to cling on those laws restraining women from enjoying these rights.
Such archaic anti-abortion laws were inherited from the British and French colonizers, who have, in their country, revised such laws to give women their reproductive rights.
The French Anti-Contraception Law of 1920 remains in force to date in some French-speaking African countries. Yet it has been repealed in France.
In Kenya, the government spends over US$ 300,000 on post-abortion care services every year for women who procure abortion under the hands of quacks. This figure is too low compared to the thousands of women who procure unsafe abortion every year.
Failure to change these laws and fund reproductive health programmes that ensure women’s rights to access contraceptives, safe abortion and post-abortion care are to blame for the high maternal mortalities in many African countries.
At the moment, unsafe abortion accounts for between 30 and 54 percent of all maternal mortality and between 50 and 62 percent of bed occupancy of all gynecological ward admissions in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Post-Abortion Care in sub-Saharan Africa: The New Developments, a paper by Dr Solomon Orero.
A recent report by Guttmacher institute and the World Health Organization (WHO) further reveals that in 2003, over 66,400 women in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa died of abortion related causes compared to 100 in developed countries. Again, other studies have indicated that Africa is the only continent where maternal deaths have been rising in the last seven years.
Without concrete proposals and actions on this front, then the millennium development goal five on reducing maternal mortality by two thirds by 2015 may remain a mirage.
To reverse this, Dr Amuyunzu says under the new funding modalities, funds should be aligned to international instruments such as Maputo Plan of Action and International Conference on Population and Development, which have specific provisions on reproductive health rights for women. This is what should happen at the Accra Agenda for Action, she adds.
The Maputo Plan of Action, which African governments have appended their signatures to, says on abortion: “Enact policies and legal frameworks to reduce incidence of unsafe abortion and unwanted pregnancies. And train service providers in the provision of comprehensive safe abortion care services where national law allows.”
All these commitments require financial and technical resources to actualize them. Yet, many African countries, even after signing this document, are now denouncing it.
A recent meeting in Arusha on Maputo Plan of Action saw government representatives from the East African countries refuse to sign the final communiqué just because it had the words Reproductive Health Rights. For this, this was giving a blank cheque to women to procure abortions.
Reproductive health rights advocates strongly believe such governments will allocate inadequate resources or nothing at all, to any programmes around reproductive health rights. For them, conditionalities or another funding mechanism need to be found to ensure women reproductive rights are not trampled on or forgotten in the new funding mechanisms.
Use of Basket Funds for reproductive health managed by a UN agency or any other major reproductive health NGO seems to rank high on their list of interventions.
Others like Dr Nehemiah Kimathi of International Planned Parenthood Federation-Africa Region want a formula developed that can be used to calculate how much of the money allocated to Ministry of Health or from the budget goes to programmes addressing reproductive health matters such as safe motherhood and abortion.
“With formulas like this, then resources meant for reproductive health issues will be assured and not given at the whims of individuals.” – AWCFS
