In Kenya, Anti-Abortion Laws Kill Schoolgirls

In Kenya, nearly half of all women give birth before age 20. Between low access to contraception, sex education and past surges in rates of sexual violence, that figure's not at all surprising.

Not to mention the fact that for many, the alternative -- abortion -- can be close to a death sentence.

Over at the Guardian, Sarah Boseley draws her readers' attention to a harrowing new report on Kenya's draconian anti-abortion laws. They're among the toughest in the world, and every year result in literally thousands of deaths.

Because, after all, the laws obviously don't prevent abortions from happening. They do, however, cut Kenyan women off from safe ones -- as the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights reports. Casualties from the law are in some cases as young as girls in their early teens. Girls like Sarah, for example, a 14-year-old girl who -- as the report documents -- was impregnated after entering the sex industry to support her family. The girl, who'd previously lost her father to HIV/AIDS, also lost her own life in June 2009, after contracting a fatal infection during a botched abortion.

Like Sarah, across the country, girls who seek abortions after getting raped or impregnated from sex work aren't offered even the most rudimentary protection. They risk dying from massive blood loss and infections from shoddy procedures, and yet the alternative to an abortion is often getting thrown out of school. (Forget sanitary pads -- every year in Kenya, 13,000 girls drop out of school due to pregnancy, meaning that only 35% of Kenyan girls aged 16-20 years old are still in school, compared to half of boys the same age.)

How bad are mortality rates? Overall, fully 35% of the country's maternal deaths can be traced to unsafe abortions. Though there are some situations in which abortion is legal, a "maze of misinformation," the authors report, keeps women from accessing the treatment (as do prohibitive costs, massive stigmatization and bureaucratic barriers).

Sometimes it can be tricky to quantify the full cost of curtailments on women's rights. But in this case, the numbers are there and accusatory. In Kenya, there are at least 2,600 women dying from unsafe abortions every year, with another 21,000 who are hospitalized. (Those are numbers are likely higher, too, as the true cause of death isn't always recorded, and women scared of stigmatization don't always seek medical attention.) For Kenyan authorities seeking to improve maternal health, there shouldn't be anything ambiguous about those numbers.

Photo Credit: Giorgio Montersino