Pro-life women marching to enter Parliament
By Umaru Fofana
Chances are that since the abortion debate got heated in Sierra Leone in January scores - perhaps hundreds - of women and girls have terminated their pregnancies. Many of them could have died in the process. So it begs the question as to whether the ban on medically-induced abortion should be enforced stringently to address this loss of life, or decriminalised to ensure the right people do it under the right atmosphere to get the right result. The right result being safety.
Some would say that safety is of the pregnant woman while others would bet it must be the safety of the foetus or baby. Whichever side of the divide is right methinks neither side has any justification - save for reasons of bigotry - to hold on to their entrenched position. Some ground needs to be given and a compromise reached in the interest of all bearing in mind the reality which doesn't require rocket science to know.
The world over, the issue of abortion triggers heated debates. Sometimes intelligently and intelligibly. Some other times irrationally doggedly. Often it is between conservative religious people and liberals. Even in the United States a country with the official motto of IN GOD WE TRUST, there exist many pro-choice people - those who support a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy. And the law protects them and their position. This, despite being Christians. This, even though Muslims.
I agree with some of the pro-life religious leaders’ points of argument namely that life is sacred and that the bible and the quran say so and frown on abortion. Except that Sierra Leone is a secular state and our laws must express that, otherwise I wonder who would judge who. Even the MPs - and I dare say some of the religious leaders - would have no moral ground to stand on. But I also believe it is a no-brainer that even the prochoice people believe in the sanctity of life. In fact that is what informs my position in this matter.
I also find some of the viewpoints advanced by prochoice proponents compelling- that the life of the woman also falls within that sanctity of life as propounded by the religious leaders. Again that is what informs my position. So it sickens me when these prochoice people fail to admit that allowing all women and girls to terminate their pregnancy at will and for no reason is certainly not the best way to go. A good number of prochoice women I have interviewed have quoted the Maputo Protocol which Sierra Leone has ratified, and it will be a wild west gangsterism to throw it in the mud. Thats not what civility dictates. Now, what that Protocol says deals only with pregnant women in difficult situations to be allowed to terminate it. And what our suffocated bill says goes way beyond that.
Owing to the traditional nature of Sierra Leoneans we allow such evil things like corruption to thrive and not challenge the leaders involved in it because our conservative thinking deifies leaders and obliges us not to defy them. And we are too judgmental about other less harmful people of our society, so much so that before now if a woman gave birth out of wedlock society unfairly viewed her as being promiscuous. And if they were school-goers they were deemed unserious and having time only for men. That is the bedrock of the opposition to abortion - perception, not necessarily the character of the person. After all hardly do people think about the latter.
My friend and colleague, Hassan Arouni recently told me a story of a woman well respected in society today who got pregnant while she was writing her school-leaving or university entrance examinations of GCE O’ Level as it was called then. WASSCE it is called now. She was so brilliant that when the results were out she topped her class. She went to collect her result at school with her newborn baby much to the shame of those who had called her names including “unserious”, among them teachers.
Sometimes I wonder who has the moral high ground to preach the notion of puritanicalness. That said, I also believe that some of the basic morals of our society must be upheld. But so must common sense. Now, if I have to declare I will state here and now that I am pro-life, but I am not anti-prochoice. I do not have the doggedness - perhaps bigotry - to ask for the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act to stay as it currently is or the safe Adoption Bill to be passed as it is at present. While the latter was passed without being well written and so many things not well thought out, the anachronistic former law was inherited from the United Kingdom which has gone ahead and amended it anyway. Like it has happened with many backward laws in our law books including the obnoxious Criminal and Seditious Libel Law which simply criminalises free speech which every government since its passing in 1965 has liked while every opposition has loathed.
I think the Safe Abortion Bill 2015 should neither be adopted hook liner and sinker, nor thrown away unqualified. And even though I agree that many laws have been passed despite the institutions they need to be implemented not being in existence, I believe the decrepit state of our health facilities cannot cope with the call for and reality of abortion in our country today, a situation that is either caused or compounded by some dirty old men, some of whom are siding with the religious leaders shouting their uvulae out denouncing prochoice women and calling them names. I was in parliament last week and I witnessed some of it.
The section of the bill which says abortion should be open to all for the first 12 weeks without explanation and without exemption, needs looking into. Even in Freetown not many of the hospitals and health centres qualify to be called that strict senso. That being the case the issue of teenage pregnancy should be pursued more vigorously and more sincerely. So far all we have seen about addressing teenage pregnancy and child marriage has been lip service. And it galls me when people also tend to doubly victimise specially girls, including sending out of school because some men impregnated them. And the men go scot-free.
As the law is today, even a woman who has ectopic pregnancy - which cannot be kept - can be charged and sentenced to life in prison if she terminates it. Therefore, the provision for abortion for pregnancy between 13 and 24 weeks should be broadly applied. So termination of pregnancy should be allowed in cases of rape, incest or where it endangers the woman’s life. Now the section which allows for abortion where there is a foetal disability should also be expunged. If retained that will definitely allow for eugenics where, for example, all blind babies will be aborted. That will be grossly discriminatory against disabled babies, and it is unfair.
But in all of this no one has asked the question as to how come our parliamentarians unanimously passed the bill in December with only abstention namely Ansu Kaikai, MP, and less than one month later they dithered and prevaricated over it. I know our separation of powers is so questionable that hardly do the majority of MPs want to be seen to be going against the wish of the president. So the fact that President Ernest Bai Koroma refused to sign the bill - and the Speaker of Parliament who can sign it in the circumstance has also refused to do so, should clearly leave us with no doubt about our separation of powers or even the conscience of some of the House.
My information is that the quorum of MPs that passed the bill in December was questionably below par. A good number of parliamentarians have told me that they were not in the House for the first passage. So the question is WHY THE RISH or WHY THE FLIPFLOP? Whatever the answer, parliament should find a middle ground and save the women and girls who need an abortion - not the who only want it. Abortion is not like doing an appendicitis operation, but it is certainly not necessarily like pulling the trigger.
(C) Politico 04/02/16
