Rant and rave but how about legalising abortion?

By Jenny Luesby

Our radio stations roared Monday morning, not to party politics, but to the protests of men seething over reports that abortion is now extremely widespread in Kenya. That there are as many as 29 abortions for every 100 live births.

With abortion remaining firmly illegal, despite efforts to enshrine it in the Constitution, women are routinely going for abortions that young girls describe as quick and easy, a five-minute job that only leaves them feeling a bit woozy.

One student, an educated girl, claimed to have undergone six abortions already before graduating from university: Saying that after one of them, at lunchtime, she even went back to class in the afternoon.

Six women a day

Yet, the darker side of this abortion frenzy shows clearly enough in our medical data. Last week, we published in The Standard data on the health conditions that took people into casualty at Nakuru Provincial Hospital through November last year.

Not one of our largest hospitals by any means, Nakuru took in 189 women in just four weeks as casualty cases following botched abortions. That adds up as more than six women a day, and many hours of daily medical attention and resources, on just this one type of medical emergency.

In fact, our data didn’t show how many of these women survived, or the medical costs and health costs of this daily traffic.

But multiply Nakuru’s figures by all our regional and local hospitals, all dealing every day with the effects of illegal abortions performed under often horrible conditions, and the words ‘human rights’ very quickly pop into the frame.

As it is, abortion only ever is a human rights issue. It’s only a case of which human rights you put foremost: The rights of the fertilised egg, or the mother’s rights.

For those who argue that every foetus began is a life, the case is clear-cut. We all see where the viewpoint comes from.

But it is another step again to say the parade of women in medical crisis and dying during abortions is their own fault: As in, had they never conceived, and never sought an abortion, they never would have ended up with a botched abortion.

Because it is just as clear cut, and demonstrable, that many are caught into a situation, which, if taken to full term, will itself cause human tragedy. When a young girl is ejected from the family home, pregnant and with nowhere to go, can we please piece together how the story unfolds from there for her and her baby?

When a marraige breaks down because it’s already stretched to the full with many children and a mistake is made and another conception began, let’s sit and do the sums that so many women have done on what it means for their existing children to starve in an effort, that even appears hopeless, to feed this unborn fourth, or fifth, or sixth.

That contentious thing

In this whole debate, it’s hard to engage without reference to religion. It is our Church that has said it is unthinkable to legalise abortion in Kenya.

But is our God different from the God of all the lands where women have legal abortions? All those other countries too had to weigh the cost in unborn conceptions against the cost in women dying from illegal abortions.

Our sums are human sums, not Kenyan sums: It is the same sum everywhere. One, or the other. Dead fertilised eggs, or dead women.

Abortion is a very grave decision. Beyond the breaching of the absolute principle of the sanctity of life, abortions also make many of these girls infertile.

Later, some of them will pray for a conception that at an earlier stage in their life, seemed like a disaster.

But law can be structured to include counselling, to assess the true impact of an unwanted birth, to support these girls and women in a process that includes basic medical healthcare, and stops killing them.

Killing thousands

Or we can stay with outlawing abortions, which has not worked, and never can. In this mdoern era, there are even abortion ‘pills’ that can be ordered over the Internet. What Government, what police force, what postal service can stop women from terminating unwanted pregnancies using pills sold worldwide?

Truly, it cannot be done.

The only thing that can be done is to refuse abortion counselling, facilities, and legitimate procedures and advice. That can be done and is being done, and it is killing thousands and thousands of Kenyan women, who end up feeling a lot worse than ‘woozy’.

The writer is Group Content and Training Editor at The Standard Group.

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