Field & Outreach
Women Urgently Need Safe Abortion Services in Africa By Rebecca Harrington and Karen Hampanda, MPH
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he field team has been crisscrossing the country this fall, making stops at campuses and communities to talk with hundreds of individuals who are committed to expanding access to reproductive health care for women around the globe. In mid-September, we traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to host a screening of the documentary film Vessel, which chronicles the journey of Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch abortion doctor and activist, and her mission to provide abortion services to women who live in countries where the procedure is illegal or heavily restricted. Dr. Gomperts is the founder of the organizations Women on Waves, which provides medication abortion to women on a ship in international waters, and Women on Web, a website that provides instructions for using medication abortion and a mail order service for prescribing and ordering the pills. Over 60 people—ranging from college students to middle-aged activists— joined us at the Gateway Film Center, a non-profit theater near Ohio State’s campus, for a rich discussion about the state of reproductive rights here in the United States and abroad. We organized 40 Population Connection — December 2015
the event with Columbus arts and reproductive rights activists. According to Amanda Patton, one of the event organizers, “The Vessel screening was wonderful—the group of attendees were very enthusiastic and the reception afterwards was a great opportunity to network with women from all walks of life.”
Not Yet Rain Panel
In October, we joined Karen Hampanda, a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Denver, and Jordan Rief, an independent researcher at Emory University, on a panel organized by the Center on Rights Development at the University of Denver. We screened the documentary film Not Yet Rain, and each panelist shared her response to the film. Not Yet Rain, directed by Lisa Russell (the author of the article that begins on page 30 of this issue), shares the stories of women struggling to access abortion care in Ethiopia, before and after the country liberalized its abortion law in 2004. During the presentations, and the thoughtful discussion that followed, panelists and audience members discussed how the denial of safe abortion care for rape survivors victimizes them a
second time; how the political struggle around abortion in the United States affects low-income American women and women who live in countries that receive U.S. aid; and how outrageous it is that unsafe abortion in the developing world kills 47,000 women each year. As a follow-up to our work together on the panel, I asked Karen to write a short piece sharing her reflections from her public health work in Zambia.
Karen Hampanda on Abortion in Sub-Saharan Africa
Due to restrictive abortion laws and a lack of trained providers, more than 97 percent of abortions received by African women are unsafe. Up to 5 million unsafe abortions are performed in the region every year, and 1.7 million women are hospitalized annually for complications arising from those procedures. Ironically, the abortion laws governing African countries are remnants from the colonial era, imposed by European countries that long ago abandoned such restrictive laws for themselves. In 14 African countries1, abortion is not Angola, Central African Republic, CongoBrazzaville, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mauritius, São Tomé and Principe, Senegal, and Somalia
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