Is Kenya About to Trample Female Reproductive Rights?

[ccharles000]

If western media is your sole news source, you’re likely to view the African women’s rights struggle as a one issue affair: female genital mutilation. But the battle over reproductive rights in Africa is just as fraught -- enmeshed in issues far thornier than the question of Super Bowl TV ads that has lately transfixed Americans on both sides of the abortion debate.

Take Kenya. For twenty years, Kenyans have been working fitfully to revise their constitution and are now mere weeks away from possibly finalizing the document. But this milestone in the nation’s slow move towards real democracy may be marred by another human rights calamity. If the constitution is approved in its current form by the Kenyan Parliament sometime this year, Kenya will join the inglorious ranks of three nations -- Northern Mariana Islands, Uganda, and Zambia -- that have prohibited abortion within their constitution.

The most recent draft of the constitution had solid human rights protections for women. However, a review by a parliamentary commission resulted in the evisceration of many of the core democratic constitutional provisions. This included amending Article 25, which in its original language guaranteed that "Every individual has the right to life" (emphasis added).

The wording choice for Article 25 is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it reflects the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is consistent with the majority of national constitutions in the world. But conservative religious groups are not partial to international legal precedence and many lobbied Kenyan parliamentarians to amend Article 25. Which they did, and then some.

http://www.alternet.org/world/145695/is_kenya_about_to_trample_female_reproductive_rights

[Skidmore]

1. In most of the undeveloped world, women's reproductive rights

have always been trampled on. Why do we always assume that most nations behave as we do?

[Jamastiene]

2. Americans have been treated like mushrooms forever now.

US media keeps us in the dark and feeds us bullshit all day every day. We are now like the embarrassed college kid who was over protected/sheltered growing up and now has to face the real world without a clue what to expect. We really are that sheltered, as a whole.