For Equality champions Capacity Strengthening for Young Women’s Advocacy for Access to Safe Abortion
30th August 2022
By For Equality
In the past years, the young feminist movement in Malawi has garnered momentum in the fight for women’s rights, especially on women’s bodily autonomy as has been seen with National and Digital campaigns such as the #TakeItToStreetsMw and championing the 50:50 campaign. Young women’s passion has been key to raising awareness on the gaps to realizing women’s rights in the social, political, economic and legal spheres, and with adequate resources and capacity building, will be key to shifting the legal and policy spaces.
Given this brief background, For Equality, with support from the Aids and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa implemented the Capacity Strengthening for Stakeholders on Safe Abortion Advocacy project, to harness the collective voice and action of young women and their movements to lead the movement for Safe Abortion, and the passing of the Termination of Pregnancy (ToP) Bill.
The project brought together over 30 Young Women and Media practitioners representing various media houses, women’s rights organizations and feminist collectives including; Oxfam Malawi, Zodiak Broadcasting Station, Nation Media House, Timveni, Centre for Human Rights Rehabilitation (CHRR), Young Feminist Network, Pepeta Malawi, Girl Talk under Choose Yourself Afrique, SheDecides Malawi, Coalition for the Empowerment of Women and Girls (CEWAG), Ivy Foundation, among others.
The ToP Bill was introduced as a starting solution to the rate of unsafe abortion, with advocacy slogans by stakeholders under the Coalition for the Prevention of Unsafe Abortion (COPUA) umbrella to “Save women’s lives.” The advocacy movement faced wide public backlash as many termed the bill to be immoral and against the Malawian culture.
The bill aims to expand the existing provisions in the Malawi Penal Code which state that safe abortions can be procured only on the condition to save women’s lives, which is very vague.
The bill expands to allow procurement of safe abortions on the following conditions;
- To save the woman’s life
- To preserve the mental or physical health of the woman
- In case of severe fetal malformation
- In the case of Rape or Defilement, if the woman or girl chooses to terminate.
In 2021, the Parliament of Malawi refused to deliberate on the Termination of Pregnancy Bill (TOP), which sought to expand on the provisions under which a Safe Abortion is accessible in Malawi. This bill was drafted in response to the drastic increase in the rate of unsafe abortions, which led to the death of many women and girls, and many more suffering from complications of unsafe abortions.
Malawi remains a hugely conservative society, where matters of women’s bodily autonomy are sidelined as they are considered taboo, and shunned based on religion and culture. This has influenced the implementation of comprehensive sex education, including the provision of quality sexual and reproductive health services including stigma-free distribution of modern contraception, access to safe abortion, and access to accurate information.
The conservative nature of Malawi has further affected young women as existing service providers are often unfriendly and judgemental, as well as the lack of access to accurate information on sexual and reproductive health services such as debunking myths around modern contraception, condom usage, unsafe abortion, especially on the availability of post-abortion care.
According to Guttmacher Institute research in 2017, unsafe abortion is one of the major causes of maternal death in the country, where complications from abortion are the cause of 6–18% of maternal deaths in Malawi with young women being the most affected.
While advocacy efforts have been made by the Civil Society to raise awareness of modern contraception, little has been done to raise awareness of the availability of post-abortion care as mandated by the Malawi Government which has further contributed to the rate of maternal deaths by unsafe abortions in the country.
A key reflection was For Equality’s proactive effort to engage stakeholders before beginning implementation of the workshops to ensure like-minded organizations understood the project objectives and called for further collaboration after the close of the project to ensure the efforts on movement building continued.
For Equality continues to advocate for access to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Malawi, including Access to Safe Abortion as a Universal Human right, and the Right to Quality Healthcare as provided by the Maputo Protocol and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, that the country is ratified to, as well as the Gender Equality Act (2013).
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