Last year was a moment of triumph over adversity for Alinafe, an underage survivor of sexual violence who challenged a law made by an all-male British Parliament in 1868 and imported to Malawi in 1925.
Rewind to October 28 2025. A sunny Tuesday. New lawmakers are taking oaths at Parliament in Lilongwe while Judge Michael Tembo is passing his verdict on the defiled girl’s right to safe abortion.
Malawi’s Parliament has sidestepped abortion issues for 61 years of self-rule—but not the 15-year-old opposed to unsafe abortion, which causes up to 18 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in Malawi, according to Ministry of Health.
She is in Standard Seven, learning about British missionaries who brought Christianity, colonial rule and laws a clinician quoted for refusing to terminate her unwanted pregnancy.
The judge finds it “harsh and inhumane” for the caregiver at Chileka Health Centre to insist that such a girl keeps the pregnancy.
“It is, therefore, only logical and in accordance with her sexual and reproductive health rights that such a girl be allowed, without let or hindrance, to demand—if she so wishes—access to abortion services,” he rules.
Unlikely heroes
The brave girl defiled by a man almost four times her age personifies how girls in Malawi often suffer abuse from people and systems that should protect them.
The ruling reaffirms young survivors’ right to demand safe abortion from both private and public clinics.
This excites campaigners against penal laws that only allow doctors to terminate a pregnancy to save a woman’s life.
“Clinging to outdated laws only pushes women to procure backstreet abortion using life-threatening methods,” says activist Emma Kaliya.
That it took a teenager in agony to revist the law exposes how lawmakers have slept on the job since independence.
Similarly, it took street vendor Mayeso Gwanda to scrap another colonial law that restricted poor majority’s freedom of movement to daytime, normalising arbitrary arrests dusk till dawn.
This shows the divide between politicians elected to make laws that reflect public interest and the harsh realities of people they ought to represent. When parliamentarians doze off, ordinary citizens suffer the crushing squeeze of bad laws, while frustrated folks turn to courts for relief.
Members of Parliament in the country cannot keep burying their heads like ostriches when abortion issues come their way.
The world largest bird is the fastest too. MPs must catch up.
Currently,they hide in ambiguities of political correctness as do presidential hopefuls when asked about abortion laws. Others find sanctuary in religious pronouncements as did rosary-wearing Nicholas Dausi of Neno in opposition to Mathews Ngwale’s private member’s Bill based on the Law Commission’s recommendations.
The Termination of Pregnancy Bill drafted by the commission after nationwide consultations easily unites the divided House under one creed: See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.
For months, big whips in the House leapfrogged Ngwale’s Bill until March 2012 when they deleted it from Parliament’s agenda, called order paper.
Throughout, Ngwale—an evangelist’s son, father of three and brother to a Presbyterian reverend—insisted: “Parliament has to discuss the Bill to save the rural poor who die from clandestine abortions while their well-off urban peers get safe abortion in private clinics.
Despite the turbulent headwinds, Ngwale sounded relentless, risking being voted out.
“That’s fear of the unknown,” he argued. “Every five years, about 70 percent of sitting MPs do not make it back to Parliament. Did they ever discuss or pass any abortion Bill?”
Gone, but not alone
On September 16 last year, Malawians voted out 64 percent of Ngwale’s cohort.
The man, nicknamed Mr Abortion, was among the unlucky 73, but some MPs, who refused to debate the proposed exceptions to the restrictive abortion laws, were not re-elected.
The ejected legislators include flamboyant Dausi who dazzled heaven and earth, saying: “Women should not be allowed to kill”.
Also rejected was a vocal Coalition for the Prevention of Unsafe Abortion member, who bizarrely fell silent when elected to Parliament in 2019. The Dowa man could not raise his hand to second the motion for Parliament to debate the Bill.
The entire House roared yes, pushing Ngwale into “a tactical withdrawal”.
However, Malawians expect —and deserve—better from lawmakers and policymakers.
Forsaken reforms
The Law Commission’s report speak of false starts, half-heartedness and suspense.
The review of restrictive abortion laws was postponed by commissioners who reviewed the Penal Code and gender laws.
Curiously, the latter was tasked to align gender laws with the Maputo Protocol, the first African Union treaty to make safe abortion a right. It requires governments to protect women’s reproductive rights, including medical abortion in cases of defilement, rape and incest; where continued pregnancy endangers her mental and physical health; and if the foetus is too malformed to survive after birth.
The Gender Equality Act embodied these exceptions word for word, but its crafters would delete mentions of abortion due to a religious backlash.
The Special Commission on the Review of Abortion Laws revived the proposed grounds.
Facing the future
If the gender equality laws were not ‘sanitised’ or its successor was not ignored, the girl would not have challenged gender laws in court.
“Make laws that protect the poor and ensure they work,” says the girl who challenged Section 19 of the Gender Equality Act, expanding access to safe abortion.
She is too young to vote or make laws, yet old enough to feel the pain and show how unresponsive lawmakers open backdoors for courts to make laws from the bench.
This is not a tale of abortion morality, but how power play that slow lawmaking.
Now, some lawmakers wonder: Is it fair or less harsh to compel an adult keep an unwanted pregnancy from rape?
They debate whether to craft a new law or just amend Section 19 to reflect the court interpretation and Law Commission’s findings.
The verdict, like the commission’s report that have been gathering dust since4 2015, make MPs job clear.
Ngwale says: “If I were still in Parliament, I was going to say now the road is clear and it’s up to the current MPs to incorporate what the judge has ruled and debate what Malawians wanted, according to the Law Commission.”
