Why it's hard to learn accurate information about abortion in Kenya

As a student conducting research on gender and sexuality in Africa, I think about topics like abortion and reproductive rights a lot. Recently, I was reading about the illegality of abortion in my own country, Kenya, when it hit me that I had no idea when and where I learned that safe, legal abortions do exist. Because of the negative messaging surrounding abortion that I had imbibed from my environment, I had always assumed that all abortions were unsafe. I started asking around and found that many of my Kenyan peers also could not point out when they learned that safe abortions existed.

In Kenya, abortion is illegal unless a girl or woman is raped, or when the life of the expectant girl or woman is in danger. In 2014, the Ministry of Health withdrew the standards and guidelines that existed to help reduce deaths from unsafe abortions, prohibited trainings on safe abortion care, and even banned medication used to terminate pregnancies safely. This ban was only recently lifted on June 13, 2019 after the Center For Reproductive Rights won a case against the attorney general, the Ministry of Health, and the director of medical services. The organization filed its case on behalf of The Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Kenya, two community human rights mobilizers, an adolescent rape survivor suffering from health complications due to an unsafe abortion, and, ultimately, all Kenyan women of reproductive age. 

Kenyan women and girls rarely get information about abortion at all because our society is heavily influenced by conservative religious beliefs. There is no sex education in the Kenyan education system, and religion seeps into classes like biology; Kenyan students are taught in their schools that abortion is evil and against God’s will. In my Christian Religious Education (CRE) classes, abortion was presented as a topic of moral conflict. We were taught that the only time abortion was permissible was when the life of woman was in danger, and even then if the woman were to die, it was “God’s will.” We were also taught that all abortions are unsafe and put women at risk of never being able to reproduce. In our heteronormartive society, motherhood is still held up as a measure of women’s value, and therefore abortion decreases her societal value. The media also promotes conservative narratives about abortion by portraying the right to abortion as an assault to what they often call Kenya’s “moral fabric.” 

What’s more, any attempt to spread information about safe abortion can land Kenyans in trouble by putting them in the line of fire of religious leaders and anti-abortion lobbyists. This was the case for Marie Stopes Kenya, a branch of international abortion service provider Marie Stopes International which, for years, has been the go-to clinic for Kenyan women and girls seeking safe abortions. In 2018, they launched a campaign dubbed “We Have Your Back” where they encouraged Kenyan journalists and broadcasters to start a national conversation about what they termed Kenya’s “unsafe abortion epidemic” and ensure women know that safe options are available. The campaign was an attempt at spreading awareness about the large number of women and girls who were losing their lives due to complications related to unsafe abortions. The media campaign elicited public outcry, and as a result, Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board banned them from offering any abortion services.The Kenya Film and Classification Board also banned the organization from advertising their abortion services because they equated the advertisements to promoting abortion. The abortion services ban was lifted in December 2018, after the Ministry of Health conducted audits on the services they were offering to ensure that they were within the provisions of the law.

Since such efforts are taken to make sure women and girls don’t receive accurate information about abortion, many women and girls fall prey to anecodtal myths about the procedure. For instance, during my time at a boarding school in Kenya, I heard many stories about schoolmates who, out of fear of being expelled from school as a result of getting pregnant, tried to induce abortions themselves using completely medically inaccurate information. I heard of cases where girls drank copious amounts of Coca-Cola, tea, or coffee because they had heard that caffeine induces abortions, while others drank concoctions made out of herbs, or even bleach and soap. In some extreme situations, girls inserted foreign objects such as metal hangers inside their vaginas to remove fetuses from their bodies themselves. These stories are not just horrifying in and of themselves, but worrying as they indicate that girls and women will always do what they must to have an abortion when they need one — no matter if the procedure is legal or not. 

Because abortion is illegal, the women who do need abortions often pursue them in dangerous ways and to tragic results. In Kenya, seven women and girls lose their lives every day as a result of complications caused by unsafe abortions. According to the 2014 Kenya Demographic Health Survey, unsafe abortions accounted for 35 percent of the maternal deaths that year, which is especially alarming compared to the global average of 13 percent. The African Population and Health Research Center also found that there is a significant financial cost for making abortion illegal; In 2016, Kenyan public health centers spent $6.3 million in treating complications related to unsafe abortion procedures. 

These figures prove that Kenyan women and girls need to have access not only to safe abortions, but to sex education and contraception as well. In a country where even the idea of offering sex and sexuality education is conflated with moral degradation, it is unfortunately still a lofty goal to ask our government to provide women and girls with information about safe abortions — let alone make them readily available and accessible. Yet, withholding such information only makes women and girls more vulnerable to unsafe abortions. Ultimately, the high number of women and girls we are losing to unsafe abortions should be a wake up call to Kenyans and the Kenyan government to make a case for safe abortions.