Ethiopia abortion law, a learning point—Kabwila

Massive cutbacks in Ethiopia’s maternal mortality rates offer a compelling case for Malawi’s ongoing push to relax abortion laws long blamed for preventable deaths of women and girls, Women Parliamentary Caucus chairperson Jessie Kabwila has said.

Kabwila spoke last week on the sidelines of the second Africa Regional Conference on Abortion in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which marked a decade since the legalisation of termination of pregnancy laws in 2006.

According to federal minister of Health Professor Yifru Berhan Mitke, making abortion legal and safe reduced the host nation’s maternal mortality rates to just 10 percent, slightly three times less than 32 percent in 2005.

Now maternal complications cost lives of 220 pregnant women in every 100 000 live births—down from 871 before women and girls had the law empowering health workers to seek abortion on demand.

Medical personnel at a remote hospital 40 kilometres (km) outside Addis Ababa quashed fears that lessening restrictions on abortion would open floodgates likely to leave Malawi’s overwhelmed healthcare system inundated with clients seeking to terminate pregnancies instead of attention to the existing disease burden.

The health workers said they get the same number of clients seeking abortions as those they used to treat for costly and deadly complications of unsafe abortion.

Interestingly, they said it is quicker and cheaper to offer safe abortion than post-abortal care which leaves the patients requiring costly operations and lengthy admissions, a burden that is presently pronounced at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre and other hospitals in the country.

Kabwila reckoned the experience in Ethiopia demonstrates the impact of liberal laws on reducing the death of pregnant women and girls, including Malawians who die using sticks, wires, toxic substances and other objects to terminate pregnancy because the law makes abortion illegal except where the life of the woman is in grave danger.

She explained: “This is a clear example and a no mean learning point of how other countries are [reaping] the benefits of progressive laws while we believe making abortion safe and legal will flood hospitals with women and girls clamouring for abortion.

“That’s the worst lie ever and this thinking portrays women as irresponsible by nature. The truth is that all women love to have babies and when one decides to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy, nothing can stop her.  The only thing that we can stop are the needless deaths emanating from clandestine abortions.”

Dr Ruth Labode, the leader of Women and Health Portfolio Committee in the Parliament of Zimbabwe, warned against widespread misconception even where abortion on demand is allowed by law.

The legislator,  who confessed to have terminated a pregnancy as an adolescent because she wanted to remain in school,  admittedly underwent thorough and repeated counselling prior it.

Equally enthused by Ethiopia’s example is Dr Ausbert Msusa, a lecturer at the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine, who reckoned there is need for public awareness and re-orienting health workers on the imperativeness of safe abortion.

“What is coming out clear in Ethiopia is acceptance that the problem is real. On the contrary, Malawi seems to be in denial and it is not surprising we have kind of left this critical sexual and reproductive health issue in the hands of non-medical people who usually cite examples of countries that have not taken up the change.  We can do better,” he said.