Kenya’s Pro-Choice Movement Faces Emboldened Threats IN A POST-ROE WORLD
Girls in my university would drink disinfectant and other concoctions if they had an unplanned pregnancy,” says Quin, a young graduate in Nakuru, Kenya. “They use pens, or go see quack doctors. You would hear of foetuses being dumped in bins”. Quin volunteers at RHCO, a sexual health project agitating for greater access to reproductive healthcare in a country where unsafe abortions are estimated to kill 2,500 women and girls each year. The project operates from a small and sparse office at the end of a dusty track, where goats, roosters and motorbikes congregate and street sellers offer water and phone credit to passers-by. Now, with the decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Quin and women’s reproductive rights activists all across Kenya know the forces resisting them – many linked to the same global organisations that campaigned for the Supreme Court decision – are about to get a whole lot stronger. […]
