The policies of medical apartheid (a term I picked up from this article, and am a big fan of) are killing women. 90 a day in Africa.
“By continuing to adhere to archaic colonial laws, by failing to implement international agreements, and by failing to act on growing evidence, we have allowed abortion to become the killing field for women in Africa,” said Ghanaian gynaecologist Fred Sai. “This is the worst case of medical apartheid that exists. There is no law forbidding men to decide on their own body.”
Sai denounced “double standards” in which wealthy people could afford safer abortions even if they were illegal, while the poor had to resort to unsafe procedures.
Unsafe abortion includes inserting sharp objects into the uterus, flushing the vagina with caustic liquids, throwing oneself from high places or repeated blows to the abdomen. These methods are responsible for 90 percent of the abortions carried out in Africa, where only Cape Verde, South Africa and Tunisia allow unrestricted abortion.
This is shameful. And U.S. policies like the Global Gag Rule are contributing to it. I wrote a column about this before the election last year, and ended it with:
When you go to cast your vote Nov. 2, remember women like Hillary Fyfe, whose abstinence-based HIV prevention group Family Life Movement in Zambia lost $30,000 in U.S. funding due to Bush’s policies.
Fyfe has seen the results of the gag rule firsthand, as women induce abortions by “swallowing pounded glass, pushing sharp needles or other unsafe instruments through their uterus, pushing poisonous substances up their vaginas like cuttings from trees or roots, drinking bleach mixed with glass, or overdosing on malaria pills.
“All of the above end up with the death of both mother and child,” Fyfe writes. “Or the child dies and the mother is crippled for life. These cases are a daily occurrence.”
While we aren’t responsible for the restrictive laws in many African countries, it remains true that America has failed African women, and women in general. Our international policies are exacerbating an already troubled situation, all in the name of “pro-life” politics. And the situation now is dire — and not at all life-affirming.
An estimated 4.2 million African women resort to these dangerous practices each year, and 30,000 die as a result, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Although only 10 percent of the global total of abortions happen in Africa, the continent accounts for almost half of the world’s deaths from unsafe abortions, with one in 12 women dying, according to WHO. For every death, 20 to 30 women suffer permanent damage to their uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, intestines or bladder.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, about 530,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth every year, nearly half of them – 247,000 – in sub-Saharan Africa.
via Feministing.