SAFEZT

Competing discourses impacting girls’ and women’s rights: Safe Abortion and Fertility control in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania (SAFEZT)

This three-year project examined global and national policy discourses surrounding fertility control and abortion, as well as local practices and moralities related to abortion among adolescents in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania. Fertility control and safe abortion highlight the controversies over sexual and reproductive health policies and the gendered socio-cultural and religious norms affecting girls’ and women’s rights. 

The dynamics at work between laws, policies and access to fertility control and safe abortion services differ between Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania. Although all three countries have ratified the major international and regional conventions and protocols on the rights of women, including the Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, the laws regulating access to safe abortion services reflect differing legal histories. For example, judicially, abortion is legal in Zambia but illegal in Ethiopia and Tanzania. In practice, however, Ethiopia is the most liberal of the three countries in terms of legal provision of safe abortion services, and the case of Zambia shows that a liberal abortion law is not a sufficient condition to secure access to legal abortion. Hence, the association between the status of the law and access to safe abortion continues to be unclear and was a central question for comparison in this research project.

The project generated comparative knowledge of the interplay between policy, legislation and socio-cultural conditions framing girls’ and women’s reproductive choices. More concretely the project explored adolescent girls’ struggles and agency in handling their fertility within the given legal, socio-economic and religious frames and revealed insights into the mechanisms through which access to abortion is regulated far beyond legal frameworks. 

In Ethiopia, the project particularly generated knowledge on the political process leading up to legal reform in 2005 and on health workers’ and women’ experiences with the implications of the legal reform in terms of actual access to safe abortion services. 

In Tanzania, the project revealed how within a highly restrictive legal abortion context, relatively safe abortion services are attainable, not the least through increasing access to medication abortion, not the least in the urban areas. An sub-study explored the vernacular employed across differently positioned categories of anti-abortion and pro safe abortion groups. 

In Zambia, SAFEZT generated knowledge on how within the frames of an apparently liberal abortion legislation, access to safe abortion services may nonetheless be highly challenging to attain. Studies included the origin of the abortion law and its ramifications for today’s access to abortion services, the role of district- and provincial health bureaucrats in implementing the abortion law and on how abortion is morally understood at community level. Moreover, the project produced a highly cited article on comprehensive sexuality education in Zambian schools. 

The project’s publications are part of a body of research that brings attention to the persistently unequal and deficient access to sexual and reproductive health services for young women, in our case in sub-Saharan Africa. The project particularly represented an effort to analyze the multifaceted relationship between abortion laws, policies and access to abortion services in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania. Using a comparative perspective and qualitative research methodology, the many papers developed within the frames of the SAFEZT project demonstrate the often inconsistent and at times even paradoxical relationship between formal abortion law and actual practices on the ground. 

In total the project produced 19 articles in international peer review journals. The project included three PhD-candidates, two post-doctoral fellows and a research track candidate in medicine. 

Principal Investigator: 
Astrid Blystad, University of Bergen, Norway

Co-Principal Investigator:
Genet Tadele, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia