"Let's Sort the Real Issue"

Views on the Abortion Bill with Morgan Kamanga.

I truly believe that this whole abortion thing is being handled in a wrong way. I would not give you the “it is a sin” argument considering that we are from different religious beliefs and after all we are all sinners. I take Abortion as a symptom to a bigger problem in the society. Legalising it will just be the same as giving painkillers to a malaria patient and expect them to get better. I have asked some of the advocates of abortion why they believe killing innocent babies is okay and should be protected by the law. Some argue that some of the women have been raped and any child born from it would be a constant reminder of the horror and would derail the future of the woman because she now has to be taking care of a baby she did not plan for. What these people fail to see is that the problem is the rape. Why can’t we focus on dealing with rape issue to protect the women so that they wouldn’t have to make this horrible choice of ending the life of the unborn?

In all scenarios most of the women, if not all, resort to abortion because they did not want the pregnancies they have. I believe if we could do a sober reflection on the issue and try to find the root cause of these unwanted pregnancies by any of the numerous root cause analyses either the Five Why’s, the fish bone analysis or any other, and deal with the real cause, the “malaria”, we would be in a better position. If we can focus on reducing or even eliminating the number of the unwanted pregnancies we wouldn’t have to worry about abortions. For example, if we punish rape harder and encourage those who have been raped to report in time, which is in less than 48 hours, they could get help to prevent the pregnancy.

To those who argue that we spend more on treating the incomplete abortions or complications of the unsafe abortion, I bet we have spent even more on other preventable conditions, okugwa mu mtengo wa mango, drunk drivers, those who have destroyed their liver on ma sachet and many more. I have never heard of anyone suggesting cutting down all the mango trees to save money for P.O.Ps. It’s somebody’s life not ours. We can’t put a dollar value on life, never. Am telling you, you can drink as much as you want, smoke every leaf on earth and if you get cancer or any other disease from it the so called free health system will pay for your hospitalisation until you die. And you are telling me let’s kill the babies in the hospitals to save on the MK 900.00 course of antibiotics, be serious.

Not to lose focus, it is not like if it is done in the government hospitals people will automatically stop doing it themselves, they are a lot of factors and it will take a lot of convincing for someone not to take some pills she got from a friend to go to a hospital. With the already strained health system this would be a nightmare to handle all the abortions. Ku pewa kuposa kuchiza. Let us, as a nation focus on eliminating the root causes of the unwanted pregnancies. The only people who will benefit from these mass-baby-killings will be the pharmaceutical companies producing the drugs used in abortion. It has never been about protecting our women, that’s why they never talk of eliminating the rapes or help in making family planning accessible to everyone. Politicians from the countries they force us to adopt this get campaign money from these companies. Let us not loss focus and remember abortion is advocated by those who have themselves, born. Let’s fight for those who can’t.

Morgan Kamanga is a pharmacist who practices at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital.