NAIROBI, August 12, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Vice President of Kenya has asked for Kenyans to support the right to life movement and promised that the cabinet would never pass any bill that would allow abortion.
Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka told a pro-life conference that he regrets pregnancies end in abortion in spite of the alternatives of adoption and foster parenting. Speaking last Friday at a dinner hosted by The Protecting Life Movement in Nairobi, Musyoka said that abortion is contrary to human dignity.
The Protecting Life Movement, founded in 2000, is an interdenominational Christian organization that has opposed a bill put forward last year by a coalition of feminist pro-abortion groups that proposes to legalise abortion and says that legalisation will reduce the maternal death rate from "unsafe" abortions.
Musyoka told the gathering, "I know that the Cabinet or even parliament will not pass any Bill that would legalise abortion ... the legislation would definitely be shot down."
Kenya is under heavy pressure from UN-based international agencies to legalise abortion. In 2007, the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) complained to the Kenyan delegation of maternal mortality rates from "unsafe" abortion and questioned whether the government had "examined critically" the proposal to decriminalise abortion. Currently, Kenyan law prohibits abortion unless two doctors confirm that the woman's life is directly threatened by pregnancy.
Kenya's abortion law is already under attack by incremental measures at the ground level. The ministry of health has instructed all public health centres that any woman who goes to a public health centre within 72-hours after being sexually assaulted is eligible to receive the morning after pill as "emergency contraception" that in many instances causes an early abortion.
The Reproductive Health and Rights Bill was put forward last year by the Federation of Women Lawyers and the Coalition On Violence Against Women. The bill declares "safe and accessible abortion-related care" is such a reproductive right and says it must be legalised to prevent maternal deaths from "unsafe abortion".
The Federation of Women Lawyers was also partly responsible for the distribution of a "study" that claimed that 300,000 abortions are committed in Kenya per year causing 20,000 women and girls to be hospitalised with related complications. The report said that 2,600 women die per year. Another group that contributed to the research of this document was the Ministry of Health and International Projects Assistance Services (IPAS), a US-based abortion lobby group. The terms "unsafe abortion" and "illegal abortion" are used synonymously by the international abortion lobby.
Abortion advocating organizations are notorious for extreme exaggeration of the number of deaths and other serious health results from illegal abortions as a primary strategy to force legalization.
Intense Media Campaign By American NGO Pushing "Plan B" Pill in Kenya
United Nations Human Rights Committee Pushes Kenya to Legalize Abortion and Homosexuality
See "Failure to Deliver" joint report from Kenyan Federation of Women Lawyers and the Center for Reproductive Rights
