When you start researching unsafe abortion, the photographs and stories are so visceral that they carve themselves into your mind like a scalpel. You find yourself able to quote details of the internal damage caused by drinking a litre of bleach. You dream at night about the news story describing the effects of a uterus being stabbed, repeatedly, with a bamboo stick.
A report published by the US non-profit agency the Centre for Reproductive Rights includes a typical tale. In Breaking the Silence, an anonymous Kenyan health worker recalls the story of a pregnant 17-year-old he encountered, “a house-help with no money . . . [who] went to somebody to try to remove the pregnancy. And the person she went to did not know the anus from the vagina. He destroyed her anus, rectum, uterus and some of the small intestine. The girl now has a permanent colostomy.”
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