I don't get why people are worried about some cartoon judgement. If the New Constitution is implemented, it will do away with such errors plus busy bodies that have been propagating corruption and evil design facilitated by the existing constitution that was made in Jehanam. The judgement should not distract us from debating the contentious issues
Lets say Kadhis court has been done away with, how do you accommodate our Muslim brothers and sisters when it comes to marriage. The const talks of one man one wife, Islam says one man can marry four wives.
Remember, the constitution is built around Christian tenets, give our brothers some breathing space.
On abortion, if you don't care about the mother, I don't understand why you care about the foetus. You insist I keep an unwanted child, will you help in its upbringing?
A better opinion is from woman who has been there, seen it all and has authority to commnent about the matter.
Dr Eunice Brookman Amissah is the Ipas Vice President for Africa, an international organisation working to improve women’s reproductive health. She is currently based at the Hague. She was a practicing gynaecologist for 40 years before becoming the Minister for Health in Ghana between 1995-1998 and then Ghana’s ambassador to the Netherlands. She explains why entrenching the abortion issue in the constitution is inappropriate.
What do the figures say about abortion in Africa?
African women are the most affected by abortion. Globally 70,000 women die annually from abortion and over half are from Africa.
It is not acceptable that any woman should be left to die because of a preventable cause. WHO estimates show that 38,000 women are dying annually in Africa. That translates to about 100 women a day.
In Kenya, another survey found that 300,000 women undergo unsafe abortions every year. About 2,000 of these die.
Why are women dying from abortion?
While Kenyan women with financial means usually have access to relatively safe abortions performed by private practitioners, most poor women must resort to clandestine means.
Women qualifying for a legal abortion are rarely able to access a safe abortion in Kenya’s public healthcare system.
How about abortion-related health care?
The Ministry of Health has made clear that emergency care for complications of abortion, both spontaneous and induced, is legal and not punishable by any part of Kenya laws.
But medical providers’ negative attitudes about post-abortion care is consistently experienced by women and in public health facilities, with women facing mistreatment — from the withholding of care to verbal abuse.
When can one procure a legal abortion?
The Penal Code can be read as creating a lawful exception to illegal abortion: when "a surgical operation...upon an unborn child" is performed "in good faith and with reasonable care" for the "preservation of the mother’s life."
However, the provision offers no guidance as to what circumstances may constitute the preservation of the woman’s life.
What are the statistics on unwanted pregnancies?
The 2003 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) shows that nearly 20 per cent of births in Kenya are unwanted and an additional 25 per cent are mistimed, making 45 per cent of all pregnancies unplanned.
However due to the illegality of abortion in Kenya, the abortion fatality rates are substantially higher than in the African region as a whole and more than nine times higher than in developed countires.
What’s the maternal mortality situation in Kenya?
Thirty five per cent of maternal deaths are attributable to unsafe abortion. I have seen so much misery at the Kenyatta National Hospital, where women with abortion-related problems have died and others lost uteruses. There is no doubt the existing laws are colonial and too strict for the modern society.
It is this concern about deaths from unsafe abortions that led to the addressing of the same in 2003 in the Africa Union Protocol on the Rights of Women Article 14 section 2c which mandates the authorisation of medical abortions in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the foetus.
What’s the situation in other African countries?
Twenty seven countries out of the 53 in Africa have ratified this protocol and made their abortion laws less stringent. In countries where abortion is legal, maternal mortality rates from abortion have gone down tremendously.
Kenya however retains some of the most severe abortion laws in the continent, a feature that is being blamed for the high maternal mortality rate.
And, even now, the draft constitution falls short of what the protocol mandates.
Should we have it in the constitution?
No. The abortion debate is not a constitutional issue. It is unfair to enshrine in a constitution something that is considered personal and a rights issue. The clause on when life begins and when abortion should be allowed should be removed from the constitution to be fair to everybody and to respect the rights of everybody.
Is abortion criminal?
In Kenyan law, yes. But we are calling for the decriminalisation of abortion. Let’s consider the realities of life today and the facts and figures about women’s lives endangered by illegal abortions. I’ve been a doctor — a gynaecologist — for 40 years, and I can tell you for sure that science has not yet determined when life begins as opposed to what some religious camps claim. Ultimately, abortion should be a woman’s choice.
But many claim that unwanted pregnancy is the penalty for irresponsible sex
But why penalise women for having sex, or force them to have children they do not want? Men have sex too, but not because they want children. Not every act of sexual intercourse should lead to a child. It is sad when women cannot access contraceptives or sexual education and can’t get safe abortion after that. All children should be wanted, and none the result of a mistake. Children should not be seen as a punishment to women.
What about family planning?
It is for the government to save the lives of women by making family planning accessible, by reviewing laws to make abortion available to those who need them and by providing post-abortion care in public and private health facilities.
http://www.standardmedia...8&catid=300&a=1
Abortion: Let women make the choice
By Brenda Kageni
Go overdrive in purchasing the goods when there's blood on the streets, expecially if the blood is your own