Ghana: Giving her, the woman, life: Dismantling the damage abortion stigma does to young people and communities

Giving her, the woman, life: Dismantling the damage abortion stigma does to young people and communities

Posted 24 August 2017
by Akosua Agyepong

My journey to understanding the dynamics of abortion stigma began first in Senior High School, when our School chaplain at Mass asked me a question in front of the student body “What will you do if you get pregnant?” Immediately I realized, I had never been asked that question but I knew what the answer was without thinking twice about it and I said it because it was the truth “I would abort it.”

Really, before then I hadn’t thought about getting pregnant but definitely the answer was sure, ‘Abortion’. It was then I began to realize that every other girl in my school would perhaps toe the same line as me but they won’t openly do it because they were afraid about how they were going to look in other people’s eye and that made me understand why a couple of them would rather drink a mixture of Coca Cola and ground glass than walk into a clinic for the procedure.

Continued at source: https://endabortionstigma.org/en/Making-inroads/2017/August/Giving-the-woman-life-Ghana.aspx