Coca-Cola and quacks

Coca-Cola and quacks
How Kenya's restrictive abortion laws are fuelling infanticide

Kenya is in the grip of an infanticide crisis – driven by poverty, unwanted pregnancies and muddled abortions laws. Adrian Blomfield discovers the deadly consequences of restricting reproductive rights. Pictures by Simon Townsley

November 25, 2019

On the streets of Nairobi, out of official earshot, nurses say there are different ways of killing unwanted babies.

Some young mothers feed them Coca-Cola instead of breast milk to make their organs collapse. Ginger beer is said to work just as well. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of others, are left to die in pit-latrines, rivers and rubbish dumps.

Or there is always the option of getting someone else to do the deed. Quacks on the back streets of urban slums are often only too willing to end a late-term pregnancy by inducing a living infant and then finishing it off with a blow to the head.

Continued: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/infanticide-in-kenya/

How a change in U.S. abortion policy reverberated around the globe

How a change in U.S. abortion policy reverberated around the globe
Health-care workers in Madagascar and dozens of other countries have faced new obstacles since Trump signed an order tying U.S. aid to antiabortion rules.

By Max Bearak and Carol Morello
Photo and video by Carolyn Van Houten
Oct. 10, 2018

BETSINGILO, Madagascar — Nana thought for a second, and then shook her head. Donald Trump? No, never heard of him.

Her humble, earthen home and field of cassava are about as far from Washington as it gets. She lives in Madagascar, an impoverished island hundreds of miles off the coast of Africa — and tiny Betsingilo is a week-long trip by bus from the country’s capital.

The distance has not stopped Trump’s foreign policy from affecting people’s lives here.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/how-a-change-in-us-abortion-policy-reverberated-around-the-globe/

Women’s bodies have become a battleground in the fight for Iran’s future

Women’s bodies have become a battleground in the fight for Iran’s future
A regressive law to boost the population has restricted the reproductive choices and rights of all Iranian women. Though some suffer more than others.

Zaynab H
29 August 2018

In the early 1990s, Iran had one of best family planning programmes in the developing world. From 1980 to 2010, it managed to cut the average number of children each woman bore from six and a half to two. But these gains have since been reversed and all Iranian women are suffering under regressive legislation passed in 2015. Though, of course, some are suffering more than others.

As a sexual and reproductive health and rights advocate, I have been working with marginalised women's collectives in underserved districts of Tehran for five years. I have seen how laws like The Comprehensive Population and Exaltation of Family Bill (or Bill 315, as it is known) most directly and severely affect the poorest women: sex workers, those with drug abuse issues, rural, migrant and ethnic minority women – those who were highly dependent on state provision of contraception.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/zaynab-h/womens-bodies-battleground-fight-for-iran-future