The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (29 page)

In 2007 over eight hundred people gathered in London for a first-of-its-kind global conference on safe abortion, organized by Marie Stopes International and Ipas. There were village midwives and high-level diplomats, doctors, politicians, activists, and more than a few clandestine providers who risk jail daily in countries where abortion is illegal. Attendees came from every corner of the world: Mongolia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Poland, Indonesia, Sweden, and dozens of other nations.

Bert Koenders, the dashing Dutch minister for development, gave the closing speech, using language that sounded shockingly brave to American ears accustomed to Republican sanctimony but utterly ordinary to Europeans. “Women’s access to quality sexual and reproductive health care services is a universal issue,” he said. “And a woman’s right to choose is a universal right.” He warned of the risk of a “conservative trend in the world,” spoke of the harm wrought by the United States, and ended with an unapologetic call for safe abortion to be made available worldwide.

“Unsafe abortion is a major killer,” he said. “An estimated 189 women die every day. We will not reduce maternal mortality until this crucial issue is addressed. Unsafe abortion in Africa is the most dangerous, so we need a full package of good quality health services that
must
include safe abortion services.... Legalizing abortion has proven to be one of the most effective ways of reducing maternal mortality rates when it’s flanked by setting up good health care facilities.”

A
frican health officials largely acknowledged this, but politics, both local and international, made it hard to act on. In May 2004, Kenya’s Ministry of Health released a high-profile report on unsafe abortion in the country. Completed with help from the Kenya Medical Association, the Kenyan chapter of the Federation of Women Lawyers, and Ipas, it claimed that 300,000 abortions were performed in Kenya each year, the vast majority of them illegal, resulting in 20,000 hospitalizations and 2,600 deaths.
⁴⁶
It recommended that Kenya honor the commitments it had made at Cairo, and there was some evidence that the government might be prodded to do just that. At the press conference publicizing the report, Health minister Charity Ngilu announced plans to buy manual vacuum aspiration kits for public hospitals to deal with emergencies resulting from unsafe abortions.
⁴⁷

Less than three weeks later fifteen fetuses, several near term, were found in garbage bags tossed beside the polluted Ngong River on the outskirts of Nairobi, and the abortion debate exploded across Kenyan headlines. According to press reports, security guards at the International Christian Centre, a Pentecostal church, saw three people dumping the bags out of a pickup truck shortly before midnight.
⁴⁸
“They were strewn on the road, their little, innocent faces twisted in death,” reported one newspaper.
⁴⁹
With them were documents—medical records and, ostensibly, abortion-related billing information—said to implicate a prominent gynecologist, Dr. John Nyamu, who ran two women’s health clinics in the city.

The case quickly became a major scandal. Nyamu and two of his nurses, one of whom was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, were arrested. Rather than illegal abortion, they were charged with murder, a crime that carries the death penalty. There’s no bail for murder suspects, so the three of them sat in prison awaiting their trial.

The Catholic Church helped keep emotions stoked. On June 3, a standing-room-only crowd of two thousand attended a two-hour requiem mass for the fetuses, arranged in fifteen white caskets, at Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica. “We are sacrificing innocent unborn babies at the altar of science and technology,” said Kenyan archbishop Raphael S. Ndingi Mwana’a Nzeki, who went on to argue that countries that had legalized abortion were now facing the crisis of low birthrates and gay marriage.
⁵⁰
After the service the caskets were interred in Lang’ata Cemetery, their graves marked by white crosses saying “Here lie the unborn infants killed in May 2004 thro’ abortion.”
⁵¹

From the beginning pro-choice activists, along with some of Nyamu’s colleagues, were suspicious. Many were convinced Nyamu had been framed. For one thing, the bodies found by the river were so developed that they looked more like stillbirths than abortions. And if the doctor was going to dump the remains of late-term abortions, why would he include so much identifying information, and why leave it all by a church? Nyamu “was not that dumb,” said Joseph Karanja, a gynecologist at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Hospital and a University of Nairobi professor.

Karanja saw the persecution of Nyamu as an attempt to strike out against obstetricians, gynecologists, and other health care providers who were agitating for abortion law reform. “It was obviously an orchestrated affair,” he said. “Within minutes of the discovery of the bodies, all the media was there. A minister who was known for his anti-choice views was also there.”

There was, it should be emphasized, no proof that abortion opponents had planted evidence. But it would also soon emerge that the case against Nyamu didn’t remotely hold up. The entire episode would remain murky and mysterious. Only one thing was clear: After the fetuses were found, the environment in Kenya changed dramatically. “We thought the dissemination of this study [on unsafe abortion] was going to spur on new activism, and a new determination by the ministry, but they actually succeeded in dampening things down,” said Ipas vice president Eunice Brookman-Amissah.

Nyamu’s trial finally began in late November. It was marked by raucous protests, as supportive health workers, wearing white lab coats and stethoscopes, stood off against more numerous antiabortion activists, some of whom were also doctors. The case dragged on for months, with Nyamu and the nurses, Marion Wambui Kibathi and Mercy Kaimuri Mathai, still locked up. According to Kenya’s
The Nation
newspaper, the evidence offered by the security guards at International Christian Centre was “laden with contradictions and inconsistencies.”
⁵²
(The presiding judge would later describe one of them as not an impartial witness but “a person who had some mission to achieve.”)
⁵³
In April 2005, nearly a year after the saga began, Nairobi’s chief pathologist told the court that a postmortem showed that the fetuses had been stillborn, not aborted.
⁵⁴
In June, after Nyamu, Kibathi, and Mathai had spent over a year in prison, a judge acquitted them. They walked out of the court—and were immediately rearrested, this time on abortion charges. Finally, a month later, the charges were dropped and Nyamu returned to his practice.

Elsewhere in Africa liberalization was moving forward. The Maputo Protocol, which went into effect in 2005, called on states to “take all appropriate measures to ... protect the reproductive rights of women by authorizing medical 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.” In 2006, health ministers from across the continent met again in Mozambique and agreed to the Maputo plan of action, which proposed concrete steps to expand access to safe abortion.

Dr. Chisale Mhango, director of reproductive health at the Malawi Health Ministry, authored it. American representatives, said Mhango, “contacted our ambassadors to express concern that the Maputo plan of action is promoting wholesale abortion, and they are alarmed that abortion can be so openly discussed at a meeting as never before.” The health ministers were not swayed. “Our women are dying from abortion, and we just have to act on it,” he said.

In June 2007, Kenyan vice president Moody Awori, a Catholic personally opposed to abortion, announced that ratification of the Maputo protocol was “high on Kenya’s agenda.” Awori noted that in Kenya, ten thousand to fifteen thousand girls drop out of school each year after getting pregnant. “Without recourse to termination of the unplanned pregnancy, their personal development is usually curtailed and the nation loses their development potential,” he said. “At worst they die at the hands of [an] unqualified abortionist. This needs to be remedied.”
⁵⁵

Conservatives immediately blamed foreign feminists. “Maputo Protocol a Blatant Case of Neo-colonialism,” ran an op-ed headline in the Kenyan newspaper the
Sunday Standard
. “Could Africa be the place where the global enforcement of sexual and reproductive rights is being engineered?” writer Mark Mzungu asked. He warned of the “danger” in the protocol’s reliance on the “western secularist view of woman primarily as a citizen with ‘equal rights’ regardless of her ‘marital status’ and not as a loving, caring wife and mother.”

This was much like the argument the Vatican had made. In his 2007 New Year’s speech to the Holy See diplomatic corps, Pope Benedict asked, “How can we not be alarmed, moreover, by the continuous attacks on life, from conception to natural death? Such attacks do not even spare regions with a traditional culture of respecting life, such as Africa, where there is an attempt to trivialize abortion surreptitiously, both through the Maputo Protocol and through the Plan of Action adopted by the Health Ministers of the African Union—shortly to be submitted to the Summit of Heads of State and Heads of Government.”
⁵⁶
Human Life International bought the domain names
MaputoProtocol.org
and
MaputoProtocol.com
, where it put up a Web site claiming that the treaty is “part of a decades-long campaign by Western elites to reduce the number of black Africans.”

T
his wasn’t a fight, however, that pitted Africans against Westerners. It was a battle between a cosmopolitan alliance of reproductive rights activists and an equally cosmopolitan network of religious conservatives. The globalization of the culture wars was revealing something important about the significant fissures dividing the world. In the aftermath of September 11, American politics abounded with talk about an epic clash of civilizations between Christendom and Islam. Such religious rivalries, however, masked an equally important polarization, both inside of countries and among them, between secular, liberalizing cultures and traditional, patriarchal ones. One saw women as ends in themselves, human beings with dignity and autonomy. The other treated them as the means of group cohesion and identity whose primary value lay in their relation to men.

When it comes to issues of sex and reproduction, religious conservatives across the world often have more in common with each other than with feminists within their own societies. The conservative Catholic writer Dinesh D’Souza acknowledged this in his 2007 book,
The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
. “Yes, I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt,” he wrote. “But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.”
⁵⁷

Women’s rights activists, too, have common interests that transcend national and religious borders. Because decisions affecting so many women’s lives are now made at the international level, feminists in different countries have a critical interest in each other’s success. And women worldwide have an especial investment in the ability of American feminists to try to move their country’s policies in a more humane direction.

Domestically, American feminism can sometimes seem tangled up in trivialities, as journalists hype fights between career women and stay-at-home moms and movies like
Sex and the City
tout empowerment as something that can be bought at Barneys. In fact, though, the degree to which American politics takes women’s rights seriously has epochal reverberations all over the planet.

At the same time, controversies in other countries can challenge the categories of the American feminist movement, with its emphasis on individual choice and suspicion of government inducements to procreate. In the first decade of the twenty-first century new kinds of demographic concerns are surfacing internationally. Easy access to abortion in Asia is being used to systematically eliminate female fetuses, creating a generation with a dangerous surplus of men. Declining birthrates in Europe portend a shrinking, aging, weakening continent (which, among other things, threatens to undermine the influence of the very liberalism that made Europe a champion of international women’s rights). The global antiabortion movement stands ready to take advantage of these issues. Concern about overpopulation led to the expansion of reproductive rights. Now, fears about gender imbalances and the graying of Europe may be used to restrict them.

CHAPTER 7:
MISSING GIRLS

F
atehgarh Sahib, a district in the northern India state of Punjab, is rich in rupees and poor in girls. Called the breadbasket of India, Punjab’s wealth is built on agriculture; flat fields of ripe, gold wheat stretch out from straight, smooth highways, plowed by giant tractors driven by turbaned Sikh farmers. Unlike in southern India, women have little role in agriculture here, which is one of several reasons that so many in Punjab see them as a useless investment, one better avoided altogether.

India, like other Asian countries, has long had a pronounced son preference, which has translated into a population with more males than females. Punjab is one of several Indian states with a history of female infanticide that shocked the British colonialists, who found entire villages without a single girl.
¹
The British banned female infanticide in 1870—almost a hundred years after they discovered the practice—yet more subtle forms of discrimination and neglect continued to cull India’s population of girls, who were, and still are, fed less than boys and given less medical care.