Abortions in my society
I was privileged to join a public university after performing exemplary well in my exams and being one of the best students in our district.
Here, I encountered a totally different life experience except the one back in the village. To start with, girls did not have the right information about sex and lacked a professional reliable means to manage their reproductive health. Managing their menstrual cycle was a huge problem and most of my friends relied on guess work and traditional methods to determine the accurate dates for their monthly periods.
There was an excitement to engage in unfamiliar behavior like alcohol intake, abuse of drugs and sex. In our second year, 13 of my friends in a class of 50 students were pregnant but 7 of them procured abortions. This became a norm. At some point, the school reported at least 7 abortions in a week and it was worrying.
Engagement in sexual activities, drug abuse and lack of a good method to manage their reproductive health affected most of the girls that time. Worrying enough, some girls procured more than one abortion and the huge outcry was. In our 3rd year, we lost a classmate to complications arising from unsafe abortion.
Access to quality healthcare for the girls was a hurdle and we all relied on the school clinic which definitely had limited resources and we couldn’t access it during our school holidays. Access to medical information and care was limited for most students I included.