LONDON, November 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Malawi is the next African country targeted by American-funded NGOs to overturn laws prohibiting the killing of unborn babies
As the next session of Malawi's parliament begins, its ministers are already talking as if a new law promoted by “IPAS,” or the U.S. -based International Pregnancy Advisory Service, is a done deal.
Pro-life activists are warning Malawi not to give into the international pressure.
“IPAS corrupts the system,” warns Obeanuju Ekeocha of the Culture of Life Africa organization, based in London. “They pretend to offer counselling and support but basically they train and send out doctors and nurses to do abortions around the world.”
And in Malawi they provide workshops and videos to legislators with a single, powerful message: Your country’s maternal death rate is too high. Botched abortions account for too large a proportion. Legalizing abortion, at least in cases of incest and rape, would address a big part of the problem.
In July IPAS Malawi won over the country’s Law Commission, a public advisory body, which called for a law allowing abortions “in cases of risks to physical or mental health, rape, incest or fetal abnormalities,” and in September an all-party group of parliamentarians, after attending an IPAS workshop, signed a statement calling for the same.
In trumpeting its successes, IPAS repeated the same statement dutifully regurgitated by local press such as the Nyasa Times: “Malawi has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world—24 percent of maternal deaths being attributable to unsafe abortion. According to a Ministry of Health study, 67,300 women and girls seek an abortion every year, and of these, 18,700 develop serious complications including loss of uterus, permanent disability.” How many women actually die from botched abortions is not revealed.
However, Ekeocha told LSN that, according to the World Health Organiation (WHO), only 8% of maternal deaths stem from abortions. But since IPAS wants people to believe the Malawi number is higher, but also doesn’t want to contradict WHO, it conceals the absolute figure for maternal deaths at 3,000 annually.
But Ekeacha does not deny that there are illegal abortions or that there are a lot of rapes. But “the rape argument is just a foot in the door,” she says. “If Malawi gives in on rape, then they are saying, ‘Yes, these unborn babies are alive, but they don’t deserve full protection under the law.’” Once that door is opened, and the concession made that life sometimes isn’t sacred, the flood of abortion-on-demand will follow, warns Ekeocha.
Ekeocha said many African countries with laws against abortions in most cases are being pressured by their support for the Maputo Protocol on women’s rights, drafted in 1994 but signed by all African countries in 2003. “It is like a time bomb. Most countries signed it because it recognized women as equals and opposed genital mutilation. But without knowing it they also agreed to abortion ‘in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus.’”
Now IPAS, Planned Parenthood and home-grown abortion crusaders claim that countries opposed to abortion must grant it, at least in these cases, which, Ekeocha told LifeSiteNews, “would open the floodgates.”
African legislators need to understand they cannot open the door just a little on killing their unborn babies, she said. “They also need to understand they are not bound to overturn their own laws to match Maputo.”
