When Alejandra Angula discovered she was pregnant, she panicked. The pregnancy was unplanned and in Namibia termination is illegal.
Dismayed at the lack of options in her home country, Angula flew to South Africa and booked into an abortion clinic in Cape Town.
“I was more scared of having a baby and being forced into parenthood than of the procedure,” said the 29-year-old IT worker, who asked for her name to be changed for the purposes of this article.
“Given how desperate I was... I would’ve tried any other means” to abort, she said.
Other Namibian women are less fortunate. Unable to afford a plane ticket, many take hours-long bus rides to cross the border and secure a legal abortion. The more desperate risk backstreet terminations.
“We receive a lot of cases of women traveling from Namibia,” said Blum Khan, country director at Marie Stopes International (MSI), a non-profit organization running sexual and reproductive healthcare clinics in South Africa.
Some arrive with “hemorrhaging or other harm” after botched abortions, he said. “Women are risking their lives.”
Maria Kamati, a nurse at the Reproductive Justice Coalition campaign group in Windhoek, told reporters that limited knowledge about contraceptives left many women exposed to unplanned pregnancies.
Despite this backdrop, hopes for change are emerging.
In 2020, more than 63,000 people signed a petition calling for an overhaul of the abortion ban.
The government has since held countrywide public hearings, enabling citizens to weigh in on the debate.
The “motion in parliament was [to] let us discuss, let us be open about it, and the discussions will inform what the right decision will be,” Namibian Deputy Minister for Health Esther Muinjangue said.
A report would be submitted to parliament for discussion, Muinjangue said.
The timeline for the document is not yet clear.
“I am hopeful that policymakers will take medical advice and evidence of unsafe abortions happening anyway, into account and make abortion accessible to all,” Muinjangue said.
Under the current legislation, abortions in Namibia are permitted only in a few cases, including when the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, or presents a threat to the mother’s life.
Women who cannot get an abortion often end up abandoning their babies in private or public spaces. More than 234 newborns were left this way from 2016 to last year, police figures showed.
About 50 landed in a “baby box” set up in 2018 by the Ruach Elohim Foundation in the coastal city of Swakopmund, the non-profit said.
“Baby dumping” was so widespread that in 2019 the country passed a law saying that women who safely drop off their child with the police or at designated safe houses would no longer face prosecution.
However, socially conservative views persist in what is a largely Christian nation.
“Each person is designed by God to be born,” Windhoek-based pastor James Wallace told reporters on the sidelines of a parliamentary committee hearing on abortion.
Yvonne Lipenda, a young woman who also attended the hearing, had a different view.
“Reproductive justice,” she said. “I need to be able to make a choice about my body.”
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