NAIROBI, KENYA – The walk to Evelyn’s house is long and difficult. A half-mile hike through Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum, over trenches of raw sewage and huge garbage heaps, reveals a home made of scrap metal, browning with rust.
She sits outside her home in an old, dirty wheelchair. She is in her forties, but appears much older. Ill health, difficult living conditions and family tragedy have taken a toll.
"I never saw a darker moment in my life then when I realized my daughter’s life was at stake."
Evelyn, 45, is a widow, a mother of four and HIV positive. She is paralyzed. She is alone.
In early 2007, she was hospitalised at Kenyatta National Hospital for nearly two years with Tuberculosis. She suffered spinal damage and has since been confined to a wheelchair. In May of 2008, her husband died from complications of AIDS and tuberculosis. When her husband died, Sarah, her eldest daughter, dropped out of school to help take care of her family.
“My daughter, Sarah, left school at the age of 13 when my husband died so she could help feed her other siblings and my two nieces,” Evelyn says.
Sarah would go from door to door looking for manual jobs. She would take any work that was offered to her. “Whenever she was lucky, we fed well. On other unlucky days we stayed hungry,” Evelyn says of her daughter’s efforts.
As the financial crisis mounted in Kenya, it was deeply felt by the people in Kibera, Africa’s second largest slum, after South Africa’s Soweto.
Evelyn winces in pain as she admits that eventually, the only thing people would pay her daughter for was sex.
Sarah earned as little as 100 shillings, $1.33 USD, to sleep with men who would often refuse to wear condoms. “She could not get paid if she did not consent to unprotected sex,” her mother says matter-of-factly.
Within a matter of months, Sarah became pregnant. She procured an unsafe, illegal abortion without telling her mother. “Sarah never wanted to disclose to me her health condition,” Evelyn says. “She suffered in silence until she was bedridden.” Only then did she tell her mother what she had been through.
“I never saw a darker moment in my life then when I realized my daughter’s life was at stake,” she says.
Sarah’s uterus was completely destroyed by the procedure and she developed a septic infection. “I could not take Sarah to hospital because abortion is illegal in Kenya,” Evelyn says. “And neither could I have let my neighbors get wind of it because of shame and because [they would] report my daughter to the police.”
Evelyn was able to obtain painkillers and antiseptic cream, but it was too late. She watched as Sarah died at home, in her bed. She was 14.
Debate Rages as New Constitution Takes Effect
Sarah’s story is not unique. With thousands of clandestine abortions estimated to take place in Kenya every year, the abortion debate has taken center stage amidst constitutional reform. Church leaders oppose a provision in the newly approved version of the national constitution that includes emergency exceptions to the country's abortion ban. Opponents of the provision, if passed is scheduled to be implemented by 2012, say that the definition of the beginning of life is not clearly defined and does not fulfil their preferred “life begins at conception” definition.
The new constitutional clause offers the right to abortion for women on emergency medical grounds. The change was proposed after a new report by the World Health Organization revealed that more than 300,000 unsafe abortions occur in Kenya annually, killing thousands. Kenyans will vote on the new version of the constitution in July.
“I think it is a lost battle for the churches because the lobby [for] abortion has money to dish out to the Members of Parliament,” says Gigi Anataloni a Consolata priest based in Turin, Italy, suggesting fraud. Anataloni, a former editor of The Seed magazine, spoke to the Press Institute’s Nairobi News Desk by phone.
The new constitution is being drafted as a result of political promises that emerged in the wake of violence after the 2007 election here that left 1300 people dead and thousands displaced.
