Although Kenya has gradually liberalized its abortion laws in recent years, activists are concerned that the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court could set back their progress.
Samson Otiago, a doctor specializing in reproductive health, attends to a patient at his clinic in the densely populated Kayole neighborhood, providing services to victims of sexual violence in September 2021. NAIROBI — Fauziah was attending a dinner party in 2016 at her friend Aisha’s home in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi. Around 11 p.m., Aisha began complaining of a stomach ache and put on a sanitary pad. Within minutes, blood had seeped through her clothing. At 2 a.m.
“In Africa, when a woman wants to do abortion, it’s not something that someone can tell just anyone about,” said Fauziah, who told this story on the condition that only her first name be used for privacy reasons. “She felt like her getting pregnant, we would call her reckless and irresponsible. She never told any of us. So she was doing this all by herself.”They later found out Aisha had visited one of the unlicensed pharmacists in the slums who are known to defraud poor women in exchange for sham abortion services. He sold Aisha a pack of pills, and she ingested them that day.
She begged the nurses to admit Aisha, but it was already too late — she died on the hospital floor, in a pool of her own blood.This is what unsafe abortion can look like in Kenya, a traditionally conservative country that has long restricted access to reproductive care. Many women and girls resort to desperate measures — using knitting needles, drinking bleach, taking unidentified pills or ingesting traditional herbs — to terminate their pregnancies.
Access to abortion varies widely around the world. In most European countries, Australia and Canada, as well as Russia and China, abortion is available on request with varying gestational limits. Within sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya occupies a middle ground; abortion is banned in places including Madagascar, the Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, while South Africa, Mozambique and Benin are among a handful of countries that allow abortion on demand.
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