Is Abortion Legal in African Countries
In many African societies, the subject of abortion is still taboo. Opinions on the subject differ, as was the case when DW discussed the issue of abortion rights in the youth program “The 77 percent”. If the law changes in the U.S. with a Supreme Court ruling this summer, some states are likely to change their restrictions on abortion. This means that parts of the U.S. could end up with more restrictive abortion laws than other developed countries, including neighboring Canada and Mexico. While unwanted pregnancies in Africa have decreased by 15% over the past 30 years, abortions have increased by 13%, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Many African countries have restrictive abortion laws that only allow the procedure when the mother`s life is threatened, as in Nigeria, or in cases of rape, incest or fetal malformations, as in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here are some key facts about abortion laws in other countries, based on information from the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Guttmacher Institute, the World Health Organization, and Reuters. Abortion is banned in a total of 24 countries. When people face barriers to safe abortions, they often resort to unsafe procedures, according to the WHO, and unsafe abortions are more common in countries with restrictive laws.
Due to the country`s restrictive abortion laws, many women in Nigeria turn to unsafe abortion procedures, which in many cases can lead to abortion-related complications. “These abortions contribute to the increase in maternal mortality and morbidity rates in the country” (Adebimpe, 2021, p. 469). It is tragic that Nigeria`s abortion legislation does not take these circumstances into account and therefore inadvertently encourages clandestine abortions and the potentially fatal consequences that accompany them. According to research authors P. Chibueze Okorie and Olubusola Adebayo Abayomi, it is still difficult to obtain reliable data for abortion statistics in Nigeria due to the lack of official figures due to the secretive nature of abortions in the country (Okorie and Abayomi, 2019, p. 165). The 2019 study found that unofficial estimated statistics suggested that abortion law in Africa was a major issue that deserved our attention.
On closer inspection, there are significant differences in how different African countries deal with abortion challenges. Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa are three countries that provide a fantastic basis for such a survey. This is partly because there is a clear discrepancy between the abortion laws practiced in these countries, even though they are all African countries. It is not uncommon for people to be tempted to believe that more liberal abortion laws are better for women`s reproductive health because they help reduce abortion-related mortality rates. However, in order to truly appreciate such a point of view, it is necessary to evaluate the manifestations that arise from a country that has illiberal abortion laws. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the right to liberty in the U.S. Constitution does not include the right to abortion, we are looking at the legal protection of abortion rights in countries closer to home. South Africa with arguably the most liberal abortion right on the continent, where access is still an issue, Namibia for its inherited restrictive abortion legislation, which has since been repealed in South Africa, and Uganda for its explicit constitutional restriction on abortion. In much of Europe, Canada and Australia, abortion laws are similar to those in the United States. In this regard, there are only a few restrictions apart from pregnancy restrictions.
The France, for example, has a pregnancy limit of 16 weeks, Spain`s is 14 weeks and Italy`s is 90 days. Recognition of a right to abortion can often be the first step in creating an enabling environment for women and girls to access abortion, but in some countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, women and girls continue to face barriers to accessing abortion. Internationally, reproductive rights such as maternal health care enjoy some universal recognition in the context of human rights, but abortion care is still lagging behind. This is largely because abortion is often not seen as a basic health and reproductive right that should be available to women and girls. It is striking that many young men critical of the liberalization of abortion laws in Sierra Leone have taken part in the debate. In 2020, Namibian activists called for the liberalization of abortion laws in Namibia. The Namibian Parliament subsequently declared a process of public hearings on abortion, which began in 2021 and is still ongoing. So far, audiences have become polarized. On the one hand, they revealed a slow shift in society`s perception of abortion as a human right and health service.
On the other hand, they have shown conservative views that the unborn fetus is more important than the rights of women or girls; And if women and girls had the right to choose to have abortions, many would terminate their pregnancies. The legal and medical standards set by WHO aim to improve access to safe abortion and are supported by many NGOs working in Africa. When it comes to access to abortion in South Africa, the battle is lost and won on some fronts. The country has a strong constitutional and legal framework that provides safe abortion services. However, due to failures in implementation, access to abortion continues to be denied to women and girls, and in many ways the right to abortion is denied in this country. (Spotlight covered this in detail here, here, here, and here.) 23 Sophia Chae et al., “The incidence of induced abortion in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2016,” PloS ONE 12, No. 12 (2017) www.guttmacher.org/article/2017/10/incidence-induced-abortion-kinshasa-democratic-republic-congo-2016; Timothée Lunganga et al. “State of Contraception and Abortion in the Democratic Republic of Congo”, Ministry of Health, 2017, unpublished.
