Despite abortion being legal for 23 years, there’s still a way to go

The Women’s Legal Centre is celebrating 20 years doing what its director, Seeham Samaai, describes as “feminist litigation”.

To celebrate this, the Women’s Legal Centre held a feminist colloquium in Cape Town, and one of the sessions was on abortion since the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act was enacted in 1996.

“The early 1990s and the early days of democracy made the space for women to claim equality. The effect of the act was to shift from having limited access [to having an abortion], which was defined by race and class, to a legal framework which allows abortion on request,” said Michelle O’Sullivan, who is the co-founder of the Women’s Legal Centre and was its first executive director.

Under apartheid, women were only allowed to have an abortion if they had been raped or were mentally ill. In order to have an abortion, women had to get approval from two independent physicians, neither of whom could perform the procedure.

“Some time in the 1970s, there was research that estimated that one in 10 women had backstreet abortions. This isn’t verifiable information because of the stigma [that comes with having an abortion],” said O’Sullivan.

In a paper analysing South Africa’s laws on abortion, the authors pointed out that “data on abortion following the passage of the 1975 Abortion [and Sterilisation] Act are limited, due to the lack of a comprehensive surveillance system to monitor abortions performed outside the medical system”.

In 1993, the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) began a research study on abortion access. Their study found that 400 women in SA died from having unsafe abortions in 1994.

O’Sullivan says abortion “was seen to be a divisive topic” and that the women in the ANC pushed for the party to prioritise reproductive laws by ensuring that abortions are legal.

In 2017, ACDP MP Cheryl Dudley proposed a private member’s bill that would force women seeking abortions to be counselled and shown electronic pictures of the foetus before getting the procedure, and would limit the procedure to women who were 12 weeks pregnant. Currently, women can get an abortion up to between 13 and 20 weeks.

The bill was heavily criticised by feminists and health activists, who argued it would limit women’s access to abortion.

“That encapsulates where we are where people want to challenge women’s autonomy,” said O’Sullivan.

Judiac Ranape, a nurse who trains nurses on how to perform abortions, said: “It’s lonely because we don’t get support at this present moment.

“I do the training and they [nurses] don’t perform [the abortion] at the hospitals. We need someone to say, ‘You did the training so follow the mandate of the Department [of Health].’ Conscientious objection isn’t controlled at all. You’ll find an operations manager who says, ‘We won’t perform it [an abortion] because it’s against my religious beliefs’.”

Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, an author and commissioner with the Commission for Gender Equality, said she was using social media to pass on information to people on where they can get abortions.

“It’s not that women don’t know that they can get it [an abortion], they just don’t know where to go,” said Mofokeng.

“We need to produce our own health content without stigma or shame so that people can know that it’s their right [to have an abortion] and there are safe ways to do it.”

In a move to inform people of which hospitals women can go to for an abortion, NGO Bhekisisa drew up a map that illustrates where these medical facilities can be found in each province. DM