SAFEZT - Competing discourses impacting girls’ and women’s rights: Fertility control and safe abortion in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania

This three-year project, located at the Centre for International Health, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen, examined global and national policy discourses surrounding fertility control and abortion, and local practices and moralities related to these issues among adolescents in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania. Fertility control and safe abortion demonstrated the controversies over sexual and reproductive health policies and the gendered socio-cultural and religious norms that impeded progress on girls’ and women’s rights.

The project consisted of three interlinked components:
Component A explored the main normative messages underpinning global policies and the campaigns of global civil society actors in the field of fertility control and safe abortion, and how these global normative messages were reflected in national policies.
Component B investigated how national public discourse surrounding fertility control and abortion in media, religious organisations and courtrooms intersected with national policy and with grass-root discourse on sexuality, motherhood and the status of the foetus.
Component C explored how adolescent girls manoeuvred between moral obligations embedded in socio-cultural and religious norms, restrictions/liberalisation in their country’s abortion law, and their own needs for fertility control. It also identified how masculinities played out in the reproductive arena in general and on abortion in particular.

Our contention was that the gendered socio-cultural dynamics, which sexual and reproductive health policies entered into, played out differently in the three countries. Diverging laws, policies and differing access to fertility control and safe abortion services made this an interesting case for comparison with relevance beyond the study contexts.

Primary objective:

• To generate knowledge on the interplay between policy, legislation and socio-cultural conditions to enhance our understanding of girls' and women's reproductive rights with a focus on fertility control and unsafe abortion in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania.

Secondary objectives:

• Investigate contradictory moral and policy discourses on girls’ and women’s sexual and reproductive rights at global and national levels.
• Generate comparative knowledge of the interplay between policy, legislation and socio-cultural conditions framing girls and women’s reproductive choices.
• Explore adolescent girls’ struggles and agency to handle their fertility within the given legal, socio-economic and religious frames.
• Examine men’s involvement in the reproductive arena with particular emphasis on the power dynamics between men and women pertaining to fertility control and abortion.