Africanews, online news media outlet, “made by Africans for a growing Africa,” wrote that abortion “[…] is currently subject to strict restrictions” in Liberia. Under current regulations, it is in fact “[…] permitted only in cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormality, danger to the life of the mother or risk to her physical or mental health.” That is, it is virtually always allowed, up to 12 weeks of the baby’s life in the womb.
But, as has often been noted, that is not enough for advocates of the “culture of death” which a certain Western country aspires to export to Africa. Indeed, in Liberia, the legislature is at work to dispose of a bill that aims to expand access to abortion, always smuggled in as “sexual and reproductive health” and cloaked in the risk of women resorting to back-alley abortion, which is dangerous to their health and lives. As if abortion, in any case, does not always end in the loss of life of at least one person, the unborn child, and as if it has not already been highlighted by absolutely authoritative studies that the numbers of maternal deaths due to “unsafe” pregnancy termination are widely inflated, which even the British Telegraph has admitted.
On June 13, 2022, a joint Senate committee began discussing the proposal, put forward by the chairman of the Health Committee in the Senate, Augustine Chea. Once the committee work is completed, the text must be submitted to the two houses of Parliament for a vote and finally, if adopted, enacted by the president, former soccer player and now politician George Weah.
After the similar cases of Namibia and Benin, and the example of Kenya, which this spring ruled that “[…] abortion care is a fundamental right under the Constitution,” unfortunately, this does not represent a precedent that gives any hope to be optimistic.