Shocking tales of abortions in marriages

Your loving wife could have procured an abortion without your knowledge. Abortions are no longer the preserve of promiscuous campus freshers who are not ready to be ‘bogged down’ by parental obligations. Married women are now taking to backroom clinics to flush unborn babies. Take Carol Mwangi for instance. The 32-year-old teacher in Kiambu County found her hubby cheating with her jobless sister who was living with them when she got paged. But she could not miss out the coincidences in her husband’s and sister’s routines.

“Whenever my husband went out of town for conferences, my sister would also go for interviews.” When she confronted the man, their argument snowballed into physical abuse with the husband threatening to involve Carol’s parents “if she continued with the allegations.” To avoid bringing shame to the family, Carol decided to drop the matter.”

But soon after, her sister and husband were back to their hanky-panky. So, when she got pregnant, two months later, “the thought of bringing up another child into this disgusting situation was revolting” she decided to abort at a clinic in Nairobi’s populous Umoja estate. Instead of waiting to usher in a ‘bundle of joy,’ the baby became ‘collateral damage,’ never to see the light of day.

Carol does not regret it as the thought of raising a child alone was too much to bear. Her husband and family thought she miscarried out of stress because of her man’s cheating ways. Nancy Kaloki, a stay-at-home wife in Nairobi, once stepped out of her marriage after a domestic tiff and prolonged childlessness, which the husband blamed on what he alleged were her multiple abortions when she was young.

“I found comfort on Facebook and before long, started receiving a lot of male attention. Eventually, I started going on dates with them, coffee here, a drink there, and whenever my husband was out of town, I would go to their houses to ‘chat’.” Of course the ‘chatting’ was more than just sitting cross-legged talking about geopolitics and global warming. She got pregnant.

“I couldn’t believe it. I had desperately yearned for a baby for years. But getting what my heart really desired turned out to be a huge mistake. I opted to abort. The procedure took less than an hour. When I was done, I grabbed an Uber and left.” Nancy’s husband never found out, and “no amount of counselling or Bible-hugging Christians could tell me otherwise.” The 35-year-old is yet to conceive again.

A 2016 report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Guttmacher Institute revealed that about 73 per cent of married women were procuring abortion due to both “material responsibilities of motherhood” and “abstract expectations of parenting.” A number of parents have decided to deliberately have small families with one or two children, to afford them quality education and other creature comforts.

Another research carried out in 2013 by the Kenya Medical and Education Trust (KMET) and IPAS found out that married women were procuring abortions due to extramarital affairs. Others opted to abort because they could not handle the pressure of another child when their businesses or careers were just picking up. Still, some women aborted because the children were sired after forceful wife inheritance. They procure abortions because they are opposed to the forced union and probably hate the man who has inherited them.

Psychologist Allan Kimani of Nairobi Counselling Services explains that abortion in marriages are a result of several factors: “Sometimes, the woman is not ready to be a mother or to raise a child. At other times, a woman might not want to put too much pressure on the husbands, or the pregnancy could just be ill-timed. The financial state of the family may also force a woman to abort.”

Patricia Oduk also aborted after “marrying in a rush.” Her pregnancy and the dream of settling in their own home was too much for her husband, even though he was financially stable. He did not share her dreams of parenthood and being tied down by a baby. He prevailed on 25-year-old Patricia, an accountant by profession, to abort.

“I was opposed to the idea of terminating the pregnancy as this was against my Christian values. I felt that this was really a blessing. But he became withdrawn and even threatened to leave me if I kept the baby. He even threatened that he will deny the baby was his and that I was adulterous,” Patricia narrated. She recalls that, “Eventually I gave in to his demands. We met a doctor in town and in just 30 minutes, my pregnancy was gone.”

Their marriage was never the same after that. They both became withdrawn and only discussed bills and “I don’t think that the marriage will ever be the same again. I no longer view him as the same man that I once idolised. I don’t want to walk away from the marriage, so I will try and get us back to a position where we can try and pick up the pieces from where we left.”

Patricia is yet to bear a child “due to some of the complications during my abortion. The walls of my womb are too thin and I have suffered two miscarriages already. We are seeking professional help, but my husband is fully to blame for what has befallen us.”