Death to the irresponsible

Last Saturday, this newspaper ran an article that stated that 60,000 women undergo abortion every year in this country. SIXTY THOUSAND! To put this in context, this is almost equal to the population of Cyangugu town [I find it hard to think of the place as “Rusizi”]. According to the Penal Code about to be promulgated [as well as the one currently in force], 60,000 women could be sentenced to imprisonment for between two and five years. Let’s consider what this means. If the Police and Courts were able to arrest and convict every single one of these 60,000 women [add to this number anyone who participated in the abortion], there would be more women in prison for abortion than the total number of prisoners in prison today. In February, the Rwanda Correctional Services said they had 58,000 prisoners. Sixty-thousand is, however, an annual figure so in two years, assuming all factors remain static, there would be 120,000 convicted of this crime - equal to the number of Genocide suspects by 1995. Leaving out the pro-life versus pro-choice arguments, there is a practical aspect of enforcement that the study raises. Is Rwanda, even capable of investigating, trying [the case backlog would be something else] and providing upkeep for so many in prison? Supposing it was, wouldn’t national resources be better spent elsewhere? Then there’s the public health cost of botched underground abortions carried out in frightful circumstances. The study claims that 40 per cent of all abortions led to some form of complication. Do the math – that’s 24,000 women each year. The study produced another interesting statistic. Forty-seven per cent of all pregnancies in Rwanda are ‘unintended’. This is an indictment on all family planning programmes in existence unless of course the per centage used to be even higher in the past [maybe we are all ‘unintended’ children?]. Unintended pregnancy is also responsible for what has been coined by the wags as the ‘Kigali proposal’. The rest of the world may know this ‘proposal’ as the infamous shotgun wedding. Some patriots have argued that the Kigali Proposal was slanderous to both the family planning habits of Rwandans as well as the institute of marriage in this country. Well, the figures show that 47 per cent of the time our family planning habits fall short. If the Sectors, in a gross violation of privacy rights, decided to conduct pregnancy tests prior to marrying couples, I wonder what proportion would qualify in the Kigali Proposal category. The study by the Ministry of Health, the National University of Rwanda’s School of Public Health and the Guttmacher Institute revealed some uncomfortable truths but it can be used as a jump-off point for positive action by both the Parliament and the Ministry of Health itself. The Ministry will have to work harder at its family planning programmes while we wait to see whether our Parliamentarians are ready to see 60,000 women go to prison each year, 40 per cent of them with a variety of health complications. Personally, I doubt very little will change in the conservative viewpoints of our esteemed representatives after all, they mirror those of most Rwandans. Abortion will probably remain illegal despite this study. In my last article, I referred to a friend of mine who stated that most aborting women were irresponsible and should ‘bear their crosses’. This study showed how many get crucified.