On January 6, the Sierra Leone government was forced to issue a statement clarifying an earlier one on the outcome of a meeting with religious leaders on a dispute over legislation seeking to lift the ban on abortion in the country.
This followed a complaint by the Catholic Archbishop of Freetown, Edward Tamba Charles, who believed his position had been misrepresented in the report.
The cleric had raised concerns about several clauses, but when the Ministry of Information reported on the outcome of the meeting, they made it sound like they had reached consensus. He said that they had not agreed, noting that the government only acknowledged their concerns.
The meeting had been convened at the behest of the leadership of Parliament, which is caught between a government desperate to pass the law and a highly culturally conservative society opposed to it.
The meeting provided a platform to iron out differences on the Bill between religious leaders and experts from the Ministry of Health.
The Safe Motherhood and Reproductive Health (SMRH) Bill seeks to end the more than a century-old prohibition of abortion by making it legal. The government says the aim is to improve the health and dignity of women and girls by providing access to reproductive health services.
Key provisions include ensuring access to contraceptives, post-abortion care, conferment of a constitutional right to safe abortion, and reduction of barriers to accessing the health system.
Proponents of the law say it is a response to the high rate of illegal abortions, which have claimed many lives and contributed to the country’s alarming rate of teenage pregnancies.
Although the current anti-abortion law, which was inherited from British colonial laws dating back to 1861, allows the procedure if the mother’s life is in danger, rights activists say it fails to specify the grounds on which this can happen, forcing women and girls into unsafe abortion practices.
This is the second time a law seeking to legalise abortion is being discussed in Sierra Leone, following a failed attempt nine years ago.
In 2015, religious leaders -- Christian and Muslim – formed a united front to oppose the law amid a heated public debate. Following mass protests led by the religious leaders and other pro-life groups, then President Ernest Bai Koroma refrained from signing the Bill into law and instead proposed a referendum to decide on it.
In 2017, the UN Population Fund reported that in Sierra Leone, 1,120 mothers per 100,000 births were dying from direct or indirect causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. It was estimated that abortions cause around 10 percent of those pregnancy-related deaths.
Although this data has changed, as the country has significantly reduced its maternal mortality rate, according to the latest UN and government figures, campaigners say that deaths due to abortion are still at an unacceptably high level.
“The proposed SMRH Bill holds the promise of transformative change for women and girls in Sierra Leone,” Marie Stopes Sierra Leone, one of the leading supporters of the Bill, said in a statement after a meeting with lawmakers as part of efforts to reintroduce the Bill.
Discussions on a law to lift the ban on abortion in the country have been ongoing since 2010. The government argues in favour of it, in the context of the Maputo Protocol, an African Union treaty otherwise known as the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. Passed in 2005, this instrument guarantees comprehensive rights to women, including the right to take part in the political process, social and political equality with men, improved autonomy in their reproductive health decisions and an end to female genital mutilation.
News of the second coming of the Bill came in early 2024, when President Julius Maada Bio announced that his government had unanimously backed a Bill that would decriminalise abortion.
“At a time in the world when sexual and reproductive health rights for the women are either being overturned or threatened, we are proud that Sierra Leone can once again lead with progressive reform,” he said in a statement to delegates of the 10th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights, hosted in the capital Freetown.
Opponents of lifting the abortion ban say the new version is the 2015 Safe Abortion Act with a new, friendlier name.
“They basically want to decriminalise abortion and they decorated it as ‘safe motherhood’ Bill,” Sheikh Omar Farouk Bah, one of the country’s most prominent Islamic scholars, said in a lecture last week.
US ‘bullying tactics’
Anti-abortion campaigners say that the Bill was secretly pushed through parliament. When word got to the public, some campaigners mobilised protests outside the House, sparking the ongoing widespread public debate.
This time, the debate took on a new dimension, after allegations that the US government under President Joe Biden was pressuring Freetown to pass the law or risk losing much-needed funding under the Millennium Challenge Corporation programme.
But the US embassy in Freetown has denied the claims, which were, however, confirmed by Republican Congressman Chris Smith, who accused the Biden administration of blackmailing Sierra Leone into passing the law.
US President-elect Donald Trump is known to be against abortion and has vowed to defund abortion programmes worldwide.
“The Biden administration’s pro-abortion bullying tactics and raw attempt at ideological colonialism is unacceptable. Abortion always ends the life of the unborn baby and harms the mother,” said Smith, who is chairman of the US House subcommittee for Global Health and Global Human Rights, in a press statement in December.
According to reports, Sierra Leone is just one of many African countries that find themselves under increasing pressure to change their pro-life laws through direct pressure from Washington and other Western capitals, and Western-funded advocacy groups.
In Sierra Leone, the US-registered African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) has been identified as being at the forefront of these efforts, having reportedly received $41 million in funding in 2023. Among the donors are Western countries and foundations such as Gates, Rockefeller, Packard, MacArthur and Hewlett.
APHRC has reportedly funded the training of “safe abortion advocates” to lobby the Sierra Leone’s parliament and issued a policy brief in support of the new Bill, calling for the process to be “fast-tracked.”
One religious leader warned that passing this Bill in its current form could set a precedent for a law that could legalise same-sex relations, which are also banned in the country.
While some Sierra Leoneans are calling for the Bill to be rejected outright, others are pointing to key concerns they want to see addressed. Perhaps the biggest of these concerns is that the Bill provides for abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy. There is also the issue of terminating abortion for minors.
“As a church leader, I want to see that every life, whether it’s one week old, two weeks, a month… has the right to live. They shouldn’t be terminated. If they had terminated my pregnancy, there would have been no person called Pastor Mambu,” said popular evangelical preacher Francis Mambu, during a radio debate with government representatives.
Pastor Mambu was one of the religious leaders who represented the Inter-Religious Council at the dialogue in parliament on December 30, 2024. According to the statement published by the Ministry of Information and Civic Education, five points were discussed at that meeting. These included the conditions under which a pregnancy can be terminated, the right to access reproductive health services and informed consent for minors.
There was also concern about the exclusive decision of the mother on whether to terminate a pregnancy. The fifth concern was discrimination against people seeking reproductive health services on religious grounds.
According to the proposed amendments, the government reviewed some of the previous provisions, while leaving some ambiguous and open to different interpretations, with the potential for abuse by service providers on religious grounds.
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