Ugandan student stuns abortion conference in Accra

By Chris Kiwawulo in Accra

A Ugandan medical student on Tuesday stunned participants of the conference on eliminating abortion in Africa when he revealed that he was ready to go to jail for the cause of ensuring that girls who get unwanted pregnancies secure safe abortion in Uganda.

Maxwell Ogwal, a student at Gulu University, said he was once arrested for helping a young girl abort. “I helped a girl who had been stopped from sitting her exams at a school in northern Uganda to secure an abortion. Thereafter, Police called me to make a statement and I was detained. Although I got out on bond, I still have a case to answer.”

But Ogwal stressed that he was not about to abandon the struggle to ensure that young women access safe abortion because he believes it is a woman’s right to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. “I am willing to face any challenge in the pursuit of legalisation of abortion and ensuring safe abortion in Uganda,” Ogwal told the over 50 participants in a session on ‘Unsafe abortion and young women – their experiences, their dreams’, where he was a presenter’.

The evening session was running during the one-week conference themed; ‘Keeping our promise: Addressing unsafe abortion in Africa’, taking place at the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons in Accra, Ghana. Ogwal, who said he was forced to study medicine because he saw people suffering as a social worker in the north, urged the Ugandan Government to make abortion legal by removing restrictions and ensure that services are easily accessible because it is senseless to legalise abortion without service providers. He said he has already drafted a petition seeking the legalisation of abortion that he will submit to parliament next year after making the necessary consultations.

“Uganda can borrow a leaf from countries like South Africa on how they managed to legalise abortion in their countries. Otherwise, we are losing a lot of people out there who would have been useful to our society due to unsafe abortion yet with safe abortion, they would not have died,” Ogwal pointed out during a session chaired by Bene Mandunagu, from the Girl Power Initiative, a girl-child empowering organisation from Nigeria.
Ogwal said many young women got unwanted pregnancies during the over 20-year-old LRA insurgency but ended up dying because medical services were inaccessible. “Because people from different parts were staying together in internally displaced persons’ camps, young women would get impregnated by men. Some would be raped by rebels and they get unwanted pregnancies. They would then use herbs, sticks and other crude methods to abort. In the process, they would end up dying,” Ogwal told participants who were dead silent.

Ogwal’s co-presenter Thomas Munjovo, a peer educator from South Africa called on African leaders to emulate the South African example, arguing that maternal deaths had reduced a great deal since abortion was legalized in his country. “We are now trying to ensure that women, especially in rural areas get information about the availability of safe abortion. Our only challenge is that the services are not enough for all the people.”

Another presenter, Blain Rezene, a youth consultant from Ethiopia noted that abortion remains silent in many African countries and urged community-based organizations to sensitise the masses about the issue. She specifically called for initiation of a youth dialogue arguing that; “some male youths believe when a girl says no to sex, she means yes. This needs to be addressed because it also leads to unwanted pregnancies.”