IPNEWS: Liberia’s new public health law, which was passed by the House of Representatives in 2022 and relax amidst controversy over key component that addresses ‘the right to unhindered abortion’ by a woman, is said to resurface within the chambers of the Liberian Senate.

The draft bill faces barrage of opposition from abortion opponents. A provision in the bill, which contains a range of other public health elements, that would make abortion legal up to 18 weeks of pregnancy as long as it is done by a doctor. The original version of the bill made it 24 weeks, but lawmakers revised it to 18 weeks.

As the Ministry of Health continued its work with health law experts in the U.S. and U.K. to see the drafted law sale through after a major country-first survey released in April 2023 by the Ministry in partnership with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and others found unsafe abortions caused shocking outcomes for young women and the health system.

The study found more than half of all pregnancies in Liberia in 2021 were unintended. Thirty five percent – or more than 38,000 – ended in abortion. Alarmingly, more than six in every ten women who had an abortion had moderate to severe complications. One in ten abortions resulted in death or “near misses”. Activists say the number is likely far higher because stigma means few women admit to undertaking abortions.

Amidst all this, the International Justice Group (IJG) based in Washington, DC, the United States says the Bill is not good for Liberia and must be abandoned immediately by the Liberian Government.

“We condemn it in its entirety and further condemn the bad governance practice of bribery to influence and corrupt the decision-making process of the National Legislature and the Executive Branch of Government without regard to the public interest of the people of Liberia”, IJG executive director, Cllr. Jerome J. Verdier, notes in a statement released on Monday, November 6^th.

According to Cllr. Verdier, the AOD Bill is in fulfillment of the Weah Government’s commitment to legalize and institutionalize the gay and lesbian and transgender agenda when he authorized his Foreign Minister to sign the resolution of the U.S.- Africa Leaders’ Summit which made a commitment to the LGBTQ Lifestyle and Agenda.

He alarms that the law adopted by the House principally intends to provide “sexuality education” to the youths and children of Liberia to indoctrinate them into the gay, homosexuality and lesbian lifestyle, and encourage them to pursue sex change as a right to sex and gender change from man to woman and from woman to man in pursuit of the homosexuality, transgenderism, LGBTQ and same-sex marriage agenda in the country.

The IJG notes that while abortion continues to be a socially immoral and culturally repugnant and religiously reprehensible issue in Liberia, expanding free access to abortion at will without any limitations or restrictions, is not the answer or solution to this societal plague that needs to be redressed.

It says whereas abortion is wrong, immoral, and ungodly, leading to murder, the homosexual lesbian and LGBTQ agenda advocated by the AOD Bill is even worse, very wrong, and destructive to the future survival and prosperity of the nation, as Liberia being a sparsely populated country will decline in population, and loose its cherished culture and values.

“The Senate must reject this AOD Bill as passed by the Honorable Lower House of Representative and pursue an agenda that will promote sex health education and awareness that will promote sex in marriage only and discourages premarital sex and promotes chastity, morality and traditional family values which have been at the bedrock of the Liberian Society”, Cllr. Verdier underscores.

He explains that the antipeople, anti-population and depopulation bill is the product of fraud, corruption, and bribery against the public interest of Liberia and its people, noting that its final contents, now shrouded in secrecy, is said to contain several very draconian, repugnant, immoral, and ungodly provisions which are contrary to Christian and Islamic religious principles and therefore, contrary also, to the moral codes upon which the Liberian Nation was built and first established, esteeming the supremacy of God’s leadership and authority over the Land.

The Abortion on Demand Bill, he adds, is in furtherance to the UN 2030 Depopulation of Africa Agenda, which according to population and demographic experts, will lead to an estimated 40,000 death yearly in Liberia, and that Sweden, European Countries, and others around the world were allegedly are spending millions in bribes through their agents in Liberia to bribe members of the Liberian Legislature and President Weah to pass the AOD into law here.

The current abortion law in Liberia makes abortion legally available on certain conditions such as age of the unborn child or fetus; the life of the mother or the child; the circumstances of the pregnancy whether resulting from rape, incest, or other reprehensible acts of immorality or illegality and the approbation or approval of at least two (2) medical doctors.

Unsafe abortions are a major contributor to Liberia’s ‘very high rate of maternal mortality”, according to a 2020 report by the World Health Organization. It was one of just eight African countries that ranked that high.

“We all know that abortion is taking place—illegal abortion, that is killing millions of girls. People are dying,” said Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor defending the bill in a recent interview on ELBC, the state broadcaster. “So, the government decided that we should put in place some safety regulations for abortion, that you can go to the hospital for abortion. The law is trying to make abortion safe.”

The law has been welcomed by health providers and women’s rights activists.

“If abortion is decriminalized, Liberia would have solved a public health crisis,” said Atty. Mmonbeydo Nadine Joah, Founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit Organization for Women and Children in an email.

Women like Teta ingest harmful substances or try to clear the fetus from their wombs with sticks, clothes hangers, boiled herbs and laundry detergent.

Teta said she bled for three weeks. She has not seen a doctor since the abortion, but sometimes suffers extreme pain that she treats with a pain killing medicine.

30-year-old Markanah, another survivor, said she drank water mixed with ground glass to abort her eight-week-old pregnancy in 2020. Markanah said she felt bad but had no choice because the father was a married man who begged her to abort “to save his marriage from trouble.”

“I bled and bled,” said Markanah. “I thought I was going to die.”

Markanah has also not seen a doctor since the abortion. Experts warn women who survive are often left with lifelong injuries, severe bleeding, damage to internal organs, and barrenness.

“There are a lot of unimaginable things that women do to themselves just to get rid of pregnancy,” said Dr. Fokape Duyenku, a gynecologist at the Japanese Maternity Center in John F. Kennedy Hospital, one of Liberia’s largest referral health centers. He underscored the claim by other experts that unsafe abortion is unnecessarily draining Liberia’s already overstretched health resources.

The Center received 211 unsafe abortion cases in 2022. Dr. Duyenku said as many as one in every five required major surgery.

For Nawai Kaiser, founder of the Rural Women Rights Structure in Bong County, the bill is the result of more than a decade of lobbying. For her, it is personal.

“We want to legalize abortion to save our young girls that are dying from unsafe abortion,” said Kaiser, who lost her fourteen-year-old daughter to an unsafe abortion in 2011. “My daughter got pregnant. She was just hiding it from us and complaining about different things. We found all her inside parts were damaged, everything was rotten.”

Kaiser said she started her organization after her daughter’s death, so as not to “allow another child to die like mine.”

Kaiser’s organization is a member of the Amplifying Rights Network, a coalition of ten civil society organizations in the field of sexual reproductive health and rights advocating for the legalization of abortion. The Network insists that abortion is a human rights issue and that if there is no law on safe abortion, no one can stop unsafe abortion.

Some lawmakers have focused on the impracticality of the existing law. Representative Joseph Somwarbi, Chair of the House Committee on Health, who campaigned for its passage in the House, argued that without blood tests and scanners available in a medical facility, it is impossible for women to establish whether there is fetal abnormality as required by the current law.

If it passes, Liberia’s law would be one of the most liberal in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019, 92% of women of reproductive age lived in countries with “highly restrictive” abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization promoting sexual and reproductive rights. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest abortion case-fatality rate in the world, amounting to 15,000 preventable deaths every year.

In most European countries, abortion is legal until at least the 10^th week of pregnancy. In Sweden, it is legal until the 18^th week. In the United States, abortion was legal at any stage of pregnancy from 1975 until last year, when the Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling. It is now legal in half the U.S. states. (courtesy of New Narratives)