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‘We lost our daughters to unsafe abortion’
Unsafe abortion in Kenya is a challenge for poor women and young girls aged between 10 and17, especially in rural areas.
What you need to know:
- Maternal deaths remain high in Kenya, with a significant proportion of them being caused by complications arising from unsafe abortion.
- A nationwide study on the incidence of abortion revealed that about 500,000 induced abortions occurred in the country in 2012.
Deep in Kharanda village, a few kilometres from Kakamega town, Catherine Nyongesa, 55, strolls along a fence enclosing her modest homestead.
On the left side of her mud-walled house, she points to an unmarked grave of her late daughter, Naomi. She was her third-born child who died at the age of 14.
Naomi’s resting place has since completely sunk, and the only testament that her body lies down there are just a few pebbles encircling the grave.
In 2014, Naomi, who was in Class 6, died from complications of an unsafe abortion.
“She fell ill, a strange illness that went on for two months. I just couldn’t put my finger on what my daughter was suffering from,” says Ms Nyongesa.
A few weeks before she died, she had complained of persistent stomach aches and her mother bought her off-the-counter painkillers.
But the on-and-off pain persisted for two months, until one day when it became excruciating.
She was rushed to hospital. It turned out to be her last day alive.
“Other than the usual pain she was experiencing and which had become a norm, she also had an abnormal vaginal discharge. It was bloody,” Ms Nyongesa says.
The 55-year-old says she never suspected that her daughter was pregnant. But she remembers hearing rumours that her daughter was carrying a baby and she had taken herbal concoctions to terminate the pregnancy.
“When I remembered the rumours, I decided to look at her keenly. I got so distraught when it hit me that actually she was trying to have an abortion. That is when I rushed her to the doctor,” she says.
They left home at 7pm and headed to a hospital in neighbouring Bungoma, about 21 kilometres away.
“On the way, I asked her who’d made her pregnant but she was in so much pain she couldn’t answer. The only thing she replied was that she had taken traditional herbs. She also did not tell me who gave her the herbs,” she says.
“I decided to focus on ensuring we reach the hospital. I would ask her about the pregnancy once she got better. But that was not to be. She died before we reached the hospital. She didn’t have a chance to be seen by a doctor. We just turned back and went home to start burial arrangements,” she says.
Eleven years on, Ms Nyongesa still blames herself for her daughter’s untimely death. She feels that perhaps things would have turned out differently had she noticed the pregnancy signs earlier.
“I thought she was still a child and I didn’t expect her to fall pregnant,” she says.
But her guilt is nothing compared to the torment that she had to endure.
“I faced stigma, isolation and rejection from my neighbours. The villagers blamed me for my daughter’s death. They said I was responsible for the botched abortion,” she says.
This is almost the same experience that Aisha Mohammed, from Kwisero village, also went through. She lost her daughter, Farida, to an unsafe abortion. It has been almost a decade but time has not healed her pain.
“This stigma and the blame came from not just random people but also from well-known neighbours as well as close relatives. At first, they said that I was the one who had helped my daughter terminate the pregnancy,” she says.
“They said I killed my daughter.”
Farida was only 15 when she died.
“As a parent, it never crossed my mind that my daughter could be pregnant because there isn’t even one day that I remember seeing her with a boy, let alone having a relationship. She was in Class 6,” Ms Mohammed says.
But then, Ms Mohammed remembers a time when she saw Farida’s belly bulging.
“I casually asked her when her last period was and when she expected her next one. I guess this triggered her to start looking for ways to do an abortion,” she says.
A few days after that question, Farida took some concoction.
Ms Mohammed says she had stayed behind to watch television in the living room while her children retired to bed.
“I must have dozed off and I was awoken by muffled cries from Farida’s bedroom. She sounded like she was choking. I went to her room. It’s hard to forget what I saw. Foam was coming from her mouth. She was writhing in pain that she couldn’t walk. It was 10 pm. I rushed to my neighbour’s house to ask for help,” she says.
“He came with a boda boda and we took Farida to the hospital.”
At the hospital, the doctor began treating Farida immediately. At this point, Ms Mohammed had no idea what her daughter was suffering from.
Then the doctors confirmed to her that indeed her daughter was three months pregnant and that she had tried to have an abortion.
The doctors tried attending to her but slipped into unconsciousness.
“She never woke up. She was pronounced dead less than 30 minutes after we had reached the hospital. She never revealed the man behind the pregnancy,” she says.
The aftermath for Ms Mohammed was nothing short of a violent roller-coaster. It was a mix of emotions of guilt and numbness.
“Here I was, actively engaged in community activities, yet I didn’t even have the slightest clue that my baby was already having sex. I never saw her with any boy and I kept asking myself how I never noticed even the slightest signs of pregnancy,” she says, adding that even the teachers in school were equally shocked by the news.
Had unsafe abortion not robbed her of her child, she says, Farida would be a young woman today; educated and perhaps working.
“She would have been 31 years old today. I had many plans for my daughter. I hoped that she would complete her primary and secondary education and go to college because she was very smart in school,” she says.
Ms Mohammed regrets not knowing early. “I feel like perhaps things would have turned out differently if I had taken her to the doctor early enough and sought help,” she says, her eyes tearing.
That is the same guilt that consumes Leunida Mulembe, 71, from Burangasi village in Navakholo, Kakamega. She lost her stepdaughter, Fatuma.
On that evening in 2009, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
“As usual after supper, we retired to bed. Fatuma, who was only 15 years old and in Class 7, went with her siblings to sleep in one of the other houses within our homestead while my now late husband and I retired to bed in the main house,” she says.
At 5am, Ms Mulembe says, she was surprised by a knock on her bedroom door. It was not a school day, so the children were to sleep in.
“My son seemed rattled. He said Fatuma had fallen extremely ill that night. She barely slept. She told them not to raise an alarm in the middle of the night, insisting that she would be okay,” she says.
“I thought she must have had a fever, so I waited until the crack of dawn, which was around 6am, to go and check on my stepdaughter.”
They walked into a room reeking of vomit, and Fatuma writhing in pain, lying on her stomach.
“She couldn’t even sit. The pain was too much,” she says.
Leonida Mulembe, 71, narrating how she lost her stepdaughter during an interview in Navakholo, Kakamega County, on October 18, 2023.
They tried to get her on a bicycle to take her to the hospital, but she could not sit or hold herself steady.
They hired a taxi to a hospital in Bungoma.
“The whole time, she didn’t utter a word,” Ms Mulembe says.
At the hospital, the nurse asked Ms Mulembe if she knew that her stepdaughter was pregnant.
“I told them I didn’t know. I stood there at the ward watching them examine her. Then the baby’s head popped out,” Ms Mulembe says.
Fatuma was taken to the theatre and had surgery to remove the foetus. The doctor told us the baby was safe. Fatuma, on the other hand, was put on intravenous fluids. I touched her and I realised that her body was getting cold by the second,” Ms Mulembe says.
When doctors took samples of her vomit and ran tests, it was confirmed that she had taken poison.
“The newborn baby was wailing. The cries were getting loud every second, and so I rushed to a shop to buy the baby a packet of milk. I came back with the milk only to receive the devastating news,” she says.
“The doctor told me they tried but they could not save my stepdaughter. Just like that, she was gone,” she says.
Maternal deaths remain high in Kenya, with a significant proportion of them being caused by complications arising from unsafe abortion.
In Kenya, statistics on unsafe abortions remain scanty. However, a nationwide study on the incidence of abortion conducted by the African Population and Health Research Centre, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, revealed that about 500,000 induced abortions occurred in the country in 2012.
It also indicated that 77 per cent of women who sought post-abortion care in Kenyan health facilities were treated for moderately severe or severe complications, such as sepsis, shock, and organ failure.
“Many women and girls die while procuring unsafe abortion, but those who are lucky to survive live with grave injuries and are unable to lead productive and fulfilling lives,” says Martin Onyango, an associate director for legal strategies at the Africa regional office of the Centre for Reproductive Health Rights.
According to Mr Onyango, unsafe abortion in Kenya is a challenge for poor women and young girls aged between 10 and17, especially in rural areas. The young girls are often victims of defilement and sexual violence.
“However, there are still conflicting laws – like the 1963 Penal Code that criminalises abortion care, including those allowed under the 2010 Constitution. This continues to expose women and girls to health risks that are often associated with unsafe abortion,” he says.
“We need to find ways of promoting women’s access to quality post-abortion care, but also provide family planning and counselling and education about family planning.”
