Bill
When Eddie Mhlanga said he was a born-again Christian, a gynaecologist and pro-choice, it caused a walkout at a parliamentary hearing. Gaye Davis reports
ONE of the most forceful advocates for the Termination of Pregnancy Bill during three days of public hearings in Parliament this week was Dr Eddie Mhlanga, director of maternal health in the Department of Health.
This was perhaps understandable: his department after all had drafted the Bill, based on recommendations by a parliamentary ad hoc committee which heard thousands of submissions. But his contribution at this week’s hearings had an extra dimension.
“I am from Acornhoek, near the Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga,” he said. “I am a born-again Christian, amen. I’m an obstetrician and a gynaecologist and also a public health worker.
“I am a father blessed with two daughters, a man who has had a vasectomy because I believe that men have to take responsibility for their own fertility.”
He hadn’t wanted to become an obstetrician; he’d set his heart on becoming a surgeon. But in Acornhoek “I saw women dying every day because there were no skills to save them”.
While doing further training at King Edward VIII hospital in Durban, he treated a nursing sister who was brought in in pain and bleeding from what he diagnosed as an incomplete abortion. In the operating theatre, he discovered her uterus was gangrenous: he removed it, and her ovaries, and she was admitted to intensive care.
“Every day I was at her bedside praying that God would have mercy on her … on the 16th day, she died.
“Every year, well over 1 000 women in South Africa die because of pregnancy-related causes: about 400 of them are estimated to die because of septic abortions,” Mhlanga said.
His testimony proved too much for National Party health spokesman Dr Williem Odendaal, who rose on a point of order: “This gentleman is a public servant. Is he trying to motivate the Bill or explain to us what it is all about?”
“He is making a submission like everyone else,” said the chair, Dr Siyabonga Cwele.
There was a brief exchange, and Odendaal then left the chamber. More than anything, it demonstrated how times have changed. Five years ago, a Bill offering women equitable, legal access to safe abortions would not have been on the table. If there had been such a hearing on abortion reform, those advocating it would most likely not have been government officials and certainly not the Minister of Health. During this week’s hearings, the fringe groups weren’t those pushing for liberalisation but those describing it as murder and a crime against God.
Mhlanga’s testimony, and that of Catholic lay persons such as Mary Armour and Dr Helen Moffatt, introduced a fresh element to the Christian witness that took up much of the proceedings: that of compassion.
“At the end of the day it is unacceptable for a group of celibate men in a church in which women are barred from policy-making and the priesthood to both make and interpret moral laws on women’s reproductive choices. To refuse women access to contraception as well as abortion is inhumane,” said Armour, whose testimony prompted a delegation from the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, which intends challenging the Bill in the Constitutional Court, to walk out.
Moffatt, who converted to Catholicism at 18 because it offered her the opportunity, under apartheid, of relating to people other than white, said: “I am here to let you know there are pro-choice Catholics who in good faith and conscience support the Bill,” she said.
Black women, the “most silenced group in South Africa”, suffered the most under the current legislation. “I am pro-life but can’t support a law that forces the most voiceless in our society to suffer so much … as a comfortable, middle-class, white woman I realised I could not sit in judgment [of women who had abortions]. Legislation must allow for the reality of women’s lives.”
The starkness of that reality was underscored by testimony from a young Catholic woman who said she had fallen pregnant in 1995 after becoming involved with a Catholic priest. She could not afford to raise the child and, after counselling, had an abortion. “A member of the Catholic Church hierarchy wrote me a cheque which paid my hospital and doctors’ bills,” she said – a claim denied by the church, which says it only paid for her counselling.
Glenys Newbury of Victims of Choice [her husband is Dr Claude Newbury, head of the South African chapter of the Pro-Life Movement] described abortion as “a genocidal attack on our black population”, as well as an attack on womanhood and the meaning of life.
“I can only guess that some political or financial power is putting pressure on our political leaders and coercing them into doing something they must surely realise is an attempt to eliminate black people – and there is no easier way of doing this than by inducing them to kill their own babies.”
Her reference to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s strategy of finding “traitorous black leaders to sell out their own people” enraged African National Congress members of Parliament and prompted the chairperson, Dr Abe Nkomo, to ask that she withdraw her remarks or leave. She was allowed to continue after making it clear she was not referring to sitting MPs.
Human Rights Commission Rhoda Kadalie tackled the Christian lobby’s arguments: “The anti-abortionists are not so much pro- life as they are pro-vengeance … my advice to those who are against abortion is don’t have one, but don’t deny others their right to have one.
“The very essence of our democracy is the freedom of each religious group to teach and preach … to attempt to impose on women a particular morality based on sectarian beliefs goes beyond the legitimate role of religion in our political life.”
More than 90 groups and individuals made submissions, many of them failing to recognise that the task at hand was to focus on the Bill and suggest amendments, rather than re-open the moral debate over the rights and wrongs of abortion.
What became clear, particularly from the testimony of poor, rural women convicted of procuring abortions or concealment of birth, was that in South Africa, the issue is not whether or not there should be abortion – but whether abortions should be easily available under relatively safe conditions, rather than dangerous back-room procedures threatening the life of both mother and child.
* The Bill will be debated in the National Assembly on October 29 and in the Senate on November 5. The National Assembly’s Portfolio Committee on Health began considering the Bill this week and will continue to meet on it until October 22, when it will go before the Senate Select Committee on Health for scrutiny. Members of the public can attend, but not participate in, the committees’ proceedings.