Breaking the Silence: Abortion Rights in Kenya

WATCH: Our documentary investigates Kenya’s hidden crisis, claiming the lives of more than 2,000 people a year

18 March 2024
Open Democracy
Film:  45 minutes

Legal ambiguity over abortions in Kenya pushes thousands of women into unsafe reproductive health care services each year. It’s a hidden crisis that has claimed the lives of over 2,000 people annually, while many more end up facing life-altering complications.

In this openDemocracy/BBC joint investigation, Linda Ngari explores how abortion is shrouded in stigma and misinformation, with desperate women turning to dangerous methods.

Who is responsible for this public health crisis and what can be done to save these lives? Interviewing Kenyan women, doctors, campaigners and religious groups, Ngari breaks the taboo around abortion – and shows how controversial ‘crisis pregnancy centres’ have been allowed to flourish.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/breaking-the-silence-abortion-rights-kenya/


UK – ‘I’m not judging you’ – midwife Juno Carey on what it’s like to work in an abortion clinic

She’s looked after teenagers, rape survivors and trafficked sex workers – and assisted at terminations while she’s been pregnant herself. Still, she wouldn’t change her job for anything.

Zoe Williams
Thu 14 Mar 2024

Juno Carey, a pseudonym, is a midwife practitioner who has worked in an abortion clinic in the UK for the last eight years. She lives with her wife and their three children – the baby’s at home when I meet her, along with Carey’s sister, who’s looking after him. Carey is tidy and serene, the woman you’d single out in a playground if you needed a tissue, or a hairbrush, or some nice word on a bad day.

She has written a book about abortion that is not at all serene, but deeply knowledgable, full of conviction and not even trying to keep the peace. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book so plain in its thinking and descriptions – of the women and their situations, of what abortion care looks like and the dilemmas, sensitivities and practicalities in a terrain that is discussed so much by those who oppose it, and shrouded in silence by those who support it. I wouldn’t say Carey’s tone was ever celebratory, but what often comes over in her anonymised stories is the sheer blissful relief of no longer having to be pregnant when you didn’t want to be, and the tight bond of gratitude that exists between patients and medics. We probably don’t talk about that enough.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/14/juno-carey-midwife-abortions-terminations-rape-survivors-sex-workers


Uganda – The Sabotage Movie Premiere: A Film with a Social Cause

JAVIRA SSEBWAMI | PML Daily Staff
February 16, 2024

The long-awaited premiere of Sabotage took place last night at the Century Cinemax Acacia Mall in an elegant affair attended by players in Uganda’s arts industry, representatives from development organisations, celebrities and film enthusiasts.

Brought to life by Reach A Hand Uganda (RAHU) in partnership with Sauti+ Media Hub and Nabwiso Films, the film is directed by Mathew Nabwiso and stars Stella Natumbwe, Sharifa Ali, Jjemba Dean Austin, Denid Kinan and others in a rollercoaster drama set around a traditional wedding (‘kwanjula’) exploring sexual violence, abortion and tradition to raise awareness around Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) in Uganda.

Continued: https://www.pmldaily.com/features/entertainment/2024/02/the-sabotage-movie-premiere-a-film-with-a-social-cause.html


Making Abortion Safe Outside of the Legal System: A Q&A on Self-Managed Abortion

Sociologist Naomi Braine’s new book on the global feminist movement for self-managed abortion took her to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study activists’ work there.

FELICIA KORNBLUH
Jan 30, 2024

From 2017 to 2019, sociologist Naomi Braine, a professor at Brooklyn College, traveled in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study what she terms a global feminist movement for self-managed abortion (SMA). The result is her new book, Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion (Verso, 2023).

The story of self-managed abortion starts from the fact that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, at least half of all abortions around the world in 2017 were medication abortions, in which people used drugs to end their pregnancies. (The ambiguous legal status of abortion in many countries means that the data is incomplete.) This contrasts with the common image of so-called “procedural” abortion, which occurs under professional medical care and mostly or entirely in a clinic or hospital.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/self-managed-abortion-naomi-braine/


Michiana Chronicles: Ceci n’est plus un cintre – Abortion as a Constitutional Right in France

Anne Magnan-Park focuses on the right to “end pregnancy voluntarily” in France.

WVPE 88.1 Elkhart/South Bend | By Anne Magnan Park
Published January 11, 2024

In her memoir entitled Happening [2], Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux retraces her experience as a 23-year-old promising student. Her narrative focuses on the abortion she received in January 1964, eleven years before abortion became legal in France [3], and during which she almost lost her life. In her memoir, Ernaux draws meticulously from her journals to stay true to the details of her psychological and physical ordeals.

Continued: https://www.wvpe.org/commentary/2024-01-11/michiana-chronicles-ceci-nest-plus-un-cintre-abortion-as-a-constitutional-right-in-france


This Is How TV Shows Took On A Post-Roe America This Year

Several shows reverted to a trope that was much more common on TV in the 1990s and early 2000s, according to a new report.

By Marina Fang
Dec 19, 2023

2023 was the first full year of living in a post-Roe United States, when many people across the country directly experienced the enormous ramifications of last year’s Supreme Court decision dismantling Roe v. Wade and federal abortion protections.

Pop culture can give audiences a window into these kinds of seismic moments, telling stories that help audiences understand and empathize. However, with some noteworthy exceptions, many TV shows in 2023 failed to meet the moment, according to the newest “Abortion Onscreen” report, shared exclusively with HuffPost ahead of its release Tuesday.

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abortion-stories-on-tv-2023_n_657bbdb1e4b036ecab446888


Argentina – The Abortion Plot

A newly translated novel by the Argentinean writer Sara Gallardo provides a missing link in the history of abortion literature.

By S. C. Cornell
December 9, 2023

In the nineteenth century, when a character had premarital sex, you held your breath not for an abortion but for a wedding. Think of “Pride and Prejudice,” where Lydia’s child marriage comes as a great relief. The marriage plot relegates the actual having of children to the last page, just after the rice is thrown and the reader assured that our heroine will be happy and rich. If great Western literature of the time does allude to abortion, it does so subtly or with plausible deniability. The first time I read “War and Peace,” I managed to miss the suggestion that Hélène died of an overdose of abortifacient drugs. In “Middlemarch,” when Rosamond goes horseback riding against the explicit wishes of her doctor husband and subsequently miscarries, Eliot hastens to explain that this was a “misfortune” and that “there were plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding.”

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-abortion-plot


Brazil’s Abortion Dilemma Explored in Ventana Sur’s Pix-in-Post Debut ‘November’

By Callum McLennan
Nov 30, 2023

…The film follows Janaína, played by Mayara Santos, a star student looking to be the first member of her family to graduate college. Janaína lives in a small apartment with her grandmother and mother at their small apartment in Recife. We meet her out partying with her best friend and boyfriend. Life seems good. The shock of an unplanned pregnancy changes that. Abortion remains illegal in Brazil. The ensuing weight of branching feelings, risks and relationships fills Janaína’s life with choices no one should face unsupported.

Producer Dora Amorim told Variety, “Our characters are women living with all their complexities, contradictions, cultures and realities, who carry stories that are the foundation of their condition as women in our contemporary society and also in the North-East of Brazil.

Continued: https://variety.com/2023/film/global/ventana-sur-brazil-abortion-debate-1235813508/


Breaking the Silence: Abortion Rights in Kenya – BBC Africa Eye documentary

BBC News Africa
Nov 26, 2023
Film:  45 minutes

Across the world, debates are raging about access to safe abortion. Complications from unsafe, backstreet procedures are a leading cause of maternal death in developing countries. In Kenya, where almost two-thirds of pregnancies are unintended, unregulated terminations are estimated to claim the lives of over 2,000 women every year.

BBC Africa Eye reporter Linda Ngari investigates a hidden crisis that has led to an estimated seven Kenyan women dying from unsafe abortions every day, with many more facing life-altering complications.

Continued: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI3AKMFgVKQ


USA – To Make a Documentary About Abortion, They Had to Fight the Right’s War on Information

The experience was not unlike the obstacles abortion providers face.

JULIANNE MCSHANE,  Mother Jones
Nov 17, 2023

In 2019, when Tracy Droz Tragos started filming Plan C, her new documentary about a network of activists and medical providers helping Americans access abortion pills—which are approved by the FDA but restricted in some states—she knew some people might see it as a touchy subject. But she didn’t expect she’d have to fight to find a home for the film—or that she’d come up against the same barriers as some of the activists she followed.

“It was not easy to get this out,” Droz Tragos said of the film on a Zoom call this week.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/plan-c-abortion-documentary-streaming/