RIGHTS-SOUTH AFRICA: Without Abortion, No Future?

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gumisai Mutume

SOWETO, May 31 1998 (IPS) - For Thandi, a 22-year-old medical student, falling pregnant meant saying goodbye to her scholarship, her degree and dreams and ambitions for the future. So she aborted the foetus and said she would do so again if she fell pregnant, and the same circumstances prevailed.

“It’s luck to get a bursary; a privilege. Why should I be punished for one mistake? There is no 100 percent contraception except abstinence,” said Thandi, a first year student in Johannesburg. “I have my own plans, and will have children that I will bring up as children should be brought up when I am ready. Now I am looking forward to the future. I cannot burden people who are looking after me with another child.”

Thandi already has one two-year-old child and chances are the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1996, which has made it legal for people like her to have abortions, may be scrapped.

The Act was challenged in the High Court this week by three Christian groups who argued that a foetus had a right to life. The High Court reserved judgement on the challenge, saying it can be taken to a higher court, such as the Constitutional Court.

In court, the debate is more academic. But in this impoverished, sprawling Black township of Soweto, near Johannesburg, which is home to an estimated three million people, unwanted pregnancies, teenage sex and backstreet abortions remain everyday realities, which require urgent solutions.

“Whether it is legal or illegal, people will continue having abortions,” said Lerato, a 17 year-old mother. “I have had to give up my studies, I have no job and have to look after a child I was not ready for.”

She did not opt for an abortion, because of her strong religious convictions, but she knew of former schoolmates who aborted even when it was still illegal. Lerato still intends to go back to school when her baby is older.

Before the Act was passed, an estimated 42,000 to 300,000 South African women had backstreet abortions each year, the majority of them Black, according to the University of Cape Town’s community health department. The dangers of backstreet abortions have so often been documented, but the hazards did not stop desperate women who wanted to get rid of their pregnancies at all cost.

“Serious medical problems can arise during or after an unsafe abortion. The womb can be punctured and uncontrolled bleeding can occur,” said Gloria Mokoena of the Marie Stopes Clinic, an abortion centre. “Also, if poisonous solutions such as houisehold disinfection fluid is introduced into the womb, women can experience shock and renal failure. If these problems are not treated immediately, they can be fatal.”

Those who opted for backstreet abortions were not willing to go to hospital in the event of complications, fearing prosecution. When they did, it was sometimes hopeless.

“I remember one girl who came to the hospital bleeding profusely with her six-month old foetus still stuck in her womb. We had to carry through with the abortion, but she died,” says Thato (not her real name), a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.

“We are not allowed to kill the foetuses, but leave them to die on their own. But in this case, the foetus kept kicking for six hours, refusing to die. In the end we had to save it, on humanitarian grounds and she is now a healthy baby.”

Under the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, a woman can undergo an abortion on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only special circumstances would allow for termination up to 20 weeks.

Before the new law, doctors performed about 2,000 abortions annually – with the state’s sanction – under special circumstances such as rape, the pregnancy posing danger to the mother, a proven irreparable handicap to the foetus, or if the woman was legally classified as an “imbecile”. More than 80 percent of the women who underwent legal abortions, were White, statistics showed.

During 1997, the first year of the new Act opening up abortion to all, more than 26,000 legal terminations were carried out, and the majority of women requesting abortion were single and aged over 18. Research by the Reproductive Health Unit showed that many of these women were unemployed, between the ages of 20 and 30, and often were using contraception at the time they fell pregnant.

The profile of a woman seeking abortion at this early stage suggested that she wass doing it for socio-economic reasons and at an early stage of her pregnancy.

“If you do it within 72 hours of conception does that zygote still have rights to life? If the woman has been raped, does that foetus then not have a right to life? Where do we draw the line?” asked Felix, an unemployed graduate.

“What these Christians challenging the right to abortion are saying is that if someone did not plan something, then they should suffer the consequences. I don’t think that’s how we want our country to be run. I think they are not challenging the law per se, but the Black government that wrote it, and the Black people that will benefit.”

The Christian groups have argued that life begins at conception and that it is an undisputable biological fact. If the constitution then guarantees the right to life as the most important right, it should override all other rights, including that of a woman’s choice, they told the High Court in Pretoria.