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Back Alley Abortions cause for many young fatalities in Kenya
Dag this is crazy.
Doctors say Kenya’s strict abortion laws have forced thousands of women and girls to the backstreets where charlatans use all manner of sharp instruments — metal wires, knitting needles, forceps — to penetrate the womb and kill the foetus.
The picture is amplified across sub-Saharan Africa where 30,000 women die each year from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer life-long problems.
Kenya realized last year this was a problem when some young boys found 15 fetuses dumped in a river near Nairobi. Catholic bishops, who hold moral sway in the predominantly Christian country, held a requiem mass to condemn “the terrible holocaust of abortion”.
This is a major problem leading back to the Kenyian governments refusal to change a colonial era law prohibiting abortion. Doctors however want the law changed. One of them said,
“We cannot impose our morality on other people,” Kiarie said. “What we are basically saying is that let these women die, they deserve it.”
According to the United Nations Population Fund, about 530,000 women a year die in pregnancy or childbirth, nearly half of them — 247,000 — in sub-Saharan Africa. Activists blame male leaders for inaction on a continent where women’s rights are at best ignored, at worst, violated. “The fact that women die from unsafe abortions I don’t think impinges on the consciousness of the African male leadership,” Ghana’s Sai argued. “There’s the thinking that maternity requires deaths.”