Politics, hypocrisy and new abortion law

BY PASTOR ELLEN F. PHIRI

I have followed with keen interest the debate on liberalising abortion laws in the country to enable women who meet certain grounds access safe abortion services.

My interest began when the hot debate ensued last year after one lawmaker decided to table the Termination of Pregnancy Bill as a Private Member’s Bill.

I learnt that the Malawi Government initiated the process by requesting the Law Commission to review the abortion law, according to the preamble to the report of the Special Law Commission on the Review of the Law on Abortion.

Reads in part the foreword to the report: “For a long time the government has bemoaned the high prevalence of maternal mortality in Malawi and has identified unsafe abortion as one of the major contributing factors to this problem.

“Termination of pregnancy, except where it is performed to save the life of a pregnant woman, is a criminal offence in Malawi. In this regard, some commentators have faulted the restrictive law on abortion and the criminal sanctions that follow as contributing factors to the problem of unsafe abortion in Malawi apparently because women, for fear of the law, resort to clandestine and unsafe means to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Such commentators, including the Ministry of Health, called for a review of the law on termination of pregnancy.”

The foreword mentions the Ministry of Health as one of the stakeholders that called for the review of the abortion law. Thus, I am not surprised with such a request coming from the Ministry of Health because it is the health facilities under its jurisdiction that deal with pregnancy-related issues.

Many of us contribute to the debate depending on our basic knowledge, cultural and religious beliefs as well as emotional feelings, but not from practical experience. In this regard, there need for those of us who are not health and medical professionals to understand and appreciate that regardless of our cultural and religious beliefs, feelings and emotions about abortion, the medical professionals are the ones who directly deal with such issues.

I stumbled on an astonishing discovery when I read the above cited report. The report is available online. With a simple search using Google search engine ‘The Report of the Law Commission on the Review of the Law on Abortion’ or visiting the Malawi Law Commission website, one will be able to access it.

From the report, I found that the Malawi Council of Churches, Episcopal Conference of Malawi and Muslim Association of Malawi were represented and took part in the drafting of the much-debated Termination of Pregnancy Bill. 

The report’s foreword reads: “… a Special Law Commission was appointed under Section 133 of the Constitution to carry out the necessary law reform work on the law on termination of pregnancy.

“Membership of the Commission comprised representatives from the Ministry of Health, the Judiciary, the Catholic Church, Malawi Council of Churches, Muslim Association of Malawi, Traditional leaders, the Law Society, Ministry of Justice and the Malawi College of Medicine.”

One question that bothers me a lot is how an organisation can be part of the abortion law review process and, at the same time, oppose the very Bill it helped in its formulation. I do not know how to describe such conduct. But with my limited vocabulary, I describe such a double-faced approach as hypocrisy. If the mother bodies are indeed against abortion law reform, why didn’t they withdraw their representation when the process was underway? Why did they allow their representatives to endorse the report which has the proposed abortion law?

Strangely, their opposition to the process became loud after the Special Law Commission completed its work and the Government of Malawi gazetted the report with the proposed Termination of Pregnancy Bill embedded in it.

The paradox is that as civil society organisations are pushing the government to enact the Bill, the same mother bodies and some of their affiliates are running around opposing abortion law reform.

Unfortunately, in advancing their respective positions, the clerics miserably fail to quote verses that mention the word abortion or cite verses that directly speak to the issues of abortion and miscarriage.  

We need to ask ourselves, does the Bible mention the word abortion? Does the Bible approve or condemn abortion? What are the verses which speak directly about issues of abortion and miscarriage? Why do many religious leaders avoid quoting or preaching about such verses? 

To be continued next Thursday