Like a number of other African countries, abortion is illegal in Namibia, from the moment of conception through the ninth month. In this respect it is virtually the exact opposite of the United States, which has some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world. Observing the frequency with which abortions do occur here has furthered some of my own insights on the relationship between abortion and law, and also on the nature of gender relationships here in Namibia.
Despite its illegality, abortion is very common in Namibia, and likely has been for centuries. Most of the interviews I have conducted here deal with the punishments of crimes in the past, and one story that is often related is how, in the time before colonialism (and some maintain, after colonialism began as well), unmarried girls who became pregnant would be taken out to the forest, wrapped in straw, and then burned alive. Given the existence of such extreme penalties for unwelcome offspring (another precolonial tradition demanded the murder of newborn twins, who were a bad omen for the community), it is unsurprising that women developed the knowledge necessary to abort fetuses. For much of the twentieth century women went to traditional healers for homeopathic remedies that could be quite dangerous to the life of the woman. Reports from district surgeons for the South African administration, dating from the 1930s, describe the deaths that frequently resulted from the application of these methods. Nonetheless, the colonial administration stiffened penalties for abortion. Aside from whatever moral objections they may have held to the practice, the growth of the African population was also essential to the wealth of the colony’s white settlers, who relied on Africans as cheap labour for farms, mines, and railroads.
As Meredith McKittrick has observed in her own work on Namibia, the greatest change that occurred here in the twentieth century was undoubtedly the development and spread of Christianity, to the point where today perhaps 95 to 98 percent of the country’s population is Christian (there is an extremely small Muslim community here that does seem to be growing, however). Among other things, Christianity brought with it the religion of “development” and “technology” and the esteem with which traditional healers were once regarded has gradually abated over the years. Though some women continue to go to traditional healers for abortion remedies, other practices have taken hold.
During the last nine months that I have stayed here, I have heard much gossip about abortion among the Namibian women I know. In cases of unwanted pregnancy, extreme measures are often used. Some women will swallow shards of broken glass, others will drink toxic housecleaning substances in order to induce themselves. These drastic measures seem to be the most popular in rural areas. Here in Windhoek, there is a lucrative underground supply of abortion pills, RU-486, which are easily smuggled into the country from South Africa, where abortion is legal (and where some Namibian women go to have abortions done legally, although this kind of travel is too expensive for most people in this country). The pills sell for the equivalent of around US $75. The women who purchase them take them home, swallow them, and “bleed out” the pregnancy. This, too, can also be dangerous, because there is absolutely no medical consultation or supervision of the procedure.
A few years ago a member of Parliament tried to introduce legislation legalizing abortion in Namibia, but the public outcry forced her to withdraw the suggestion. There are thus no statistics on the frequency of abortion here. My best guess would be that the figure would rival the percentage of pregnancies which are aborted in the U.S., and perhaps surpass them. The law is, and always has been, manifestly incapable of preventing abortion from occuring. From my vantage point, it seems clear that the primary effect of keeping abortion illegal is not to prevent abortions, but rather to criminalize women’s sexuality and to endanger women’s lives. It is an effort by men to exert control over female bodies, although it is necessarily a partial failure in this regard, as men are, as they have always been, incapable of stopping the practice from occurring.
It would be nice to leave the matter here and not attempt to apply anything that I have written to the heated debate over abortion in the U.S., but one thing I have definitely realized this year is that we Americans can’t help but take anything occurring in the world and attempt to force it into our own cultural discourses. What I will say is that some of what I have written is likely inapplicable to the United States, which as an industrialized, wealthy nation with a much different religious and social history has its own internal gender dynamics. I would also point out that if abortion is so prevalent in a country where it has never been legal, and where the technology, equipment, and expertise necessary to conduct safe abortions have never been present, how do abortion foes in the United States, where the practice has been legal for over a hundred years (if you count both the post-Roe years and also the time before the mid-nineteenth century, when abortion was outlawed), and where the technology and knowledge necessary for conducting abortions is so common, expect the law to prevent abortions from occurring? Is their goal to reduce the number of abortions, or is it to have the law inscribe their own system of morality?
