It’s also very easy to have a whole other day job while still in the pay of the Government – meaning you only turn up for work on pay day. Chapter Six of the Draft Constitution (Articles 75 – 78, specifically) deal with this and other aspects of leadership and integrity. Someone in our comic isn’t too happy to hear that.

The Draft Constitution has a simple remedy for that situation.

It’s part of a mini-campaign we’re running here at Kuweni Serious to get our generation to actually read the Draft Constitution rather than let people tell them what’s in there, or listen to all the propaganda from the various teams.

“If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence and neglect, they could make the world shine.” – Michael J. Tucker

“I was stunned when I saw on the ultrasound a tiny, living creature spinning around in my womb. Tap-dancing, I think. Waving its tiny arms around and trying to suck its thumb. I could have sworn I heard it laughing.” – Madonna

I had an experience while I was in school that really made me rethink my stand on this matter. It was late, close to midnight and a seventeen year old girl came into casualty, well and truly sick – vomiting, vomiting and very, very feverish with a foul, foul vaginal discharge. With a Stink that was holding a one-way express ticket to high heaven.

Sister furrowed her nose, made those “there’s a bad smell” wordless exclamations that only middle-aged African women can make, you know. The ones that communicate hatred for the Smell, disbelief that something can smell so horrid, and utter disdain for the source of the justly maligned Odour.

She then filled the room with air-freshener, and it was infinitely more disgusting to mix the already deathly Smell with that of violently murdered flowers canned for the sake of commerce – then she threw up her hands and yelled, “I can’t do this today!” and left dramatically, slamming the door – leaving me, the doctor, the patient, her mother, her other seven-month old child and Smell-from-Hell alone in the room together.

By that time the patient – through her shivers – had told us a fantastic tale about how that Smell came as an allergic reaction to her contraceptive injection two days before – we ignored that blatant lie. The doctor – a very tall, very dark man who’s usually quite the teddy bear – frowned a scary frown upon her and shook his fists.
The truth came pouring out once we had kicked (grand)mother and infant out of the room.

She was seventeen, with another child out of wedlock and her mother was already taking care of that child (the same pair of people we’d just kicked out of the room). So when she discovered she was pregnant again, she felt that she really couldn’t take that story home again. She went to a backstreet clinic and a hanger was untwisted and used, then she went home convinced the problem had gone away. Then the sickness descended and she tried to hide it.

But then came the Smell.

One has no words to say about that sad, sad, sad event. Many people can argue that she was irresponsible, and she should have known better, but the facts remain, and they were Smelling all over the place. Who could honestly come to her at that point in time and tell her what she should have done? In this, our society which frowns upon publicly-admitted abortions and at the same time frowns upon young, unwed mothers (especially this one, who didn’t seem to have learned any kind of “lesson” from her past, whatever the “lesson” is supposed to be)?

After that, I really started to think about what pro-life and pro-choice actually mean.

We are led to believe that pro-lifers are activists for morals and for the life of the unborn; a tiny, vulnerable someone who cannot fight for him or herself. Their usual saying is that you and I were not aborted, so why should we take away someone else’s right to live? That life is not a decision we can make because it’s not ours to give.

Their opponents say they are violent, patriarchal fundamentalists with no real understanding of real life or of the need for family planning, or of the horrible things that can happen to a woman to make her pregnant. “What about rape?” they ask, “Incest? Pregnancies resulting from abuse of women who are mentally challenged?” They are accused of using pressure and coercion and guilt trips to get their point across.

The pro-choicers on the other hand, see themselves as agitating for a woman’s right to decide what should be done with her body. She doesn’t have to be pregnant if she doesn’t want to be. Pregnancy -with how it can weaken and sicken the body – should never be forced upon someone. And they say that that is another choice used by men to put them down, and that men cannot really have a say in the matter as they will never understand where the woman is coming from.

Women have to leave school and jobs and recover from pregnancy and childbirth and then be depended on for years, and that can have all kinds of negative effects on her person. The pro-life movement have labeled the pro-choicers as heartless, amoral murderers, pagans, feminists and people out to make money from a child’s blood.

So there it is.

On principle, I fall on the pro-life side of the debate, but I asked myself the other day, when I remembered the unfortunate 17 year old, “Isn’t it unfortunate that the Church – perhaps because it falls so close to their docket – acts as though they own the pro-life team? It’s a ridiculously incomplete picture. Who doesn’t want happy, healthy children around? Happy, healthy children are indicators of a happy, healthy society; of happy, healthy living.

So if you desire happiness and health for yourself and the generations after then you, my friend, are pro-life, whether you like it or not. And why must a life be protected only when in-utero, and be completely unshielded when it’s delivered into this harsh, cruel world? Mothers are single more often than not because the fathers have denied responsibility for the pregnancy.

So why aren’t we fighting for legislature that would make it easier for women to get child support? Laws that would give women time to take their children to the clinic when they get sick? Laws that would allow a woman certain allowances – if she can prove she is entirely without support – to take care of the child? There are a million ways all the above can be misused by the unscrupulous, but there are a million ways anything can be abused by the unscrupulous.

And why would the Church demand that a woman should keep the pregnancy while ostracizing her and talking badly about her, leaving her deeply scarred for life? Being a mother is one of the most difficult things that any woman will ever have to do.

The fact that the pro-life squad only cares about the unborn – to me – is one of the deepest kinds of hypocrisy. Pro-lifers must also ask themselves, what do we think should be done with prisoners of war? With the old and the infirm? With prisoners on death row?

Why, indeed, must women raise babies if they don’t want them? There are plenty of baby-less families roaming the earth, looking for babies to love…and a glut of unwanted babies in some corners of the world.

I do know that some of the stories about post-abortion traumatic stress disorders, infertility, feeling haunted by past decisions, infinitely deep regrets, depressions, psychoses and suicides are documented facts. The human being, and the woman by default, is a creature that is composed of mind, body and that intangible thing that goes away when you die; the soul, the spirit. The termination of a pregnancy is not just like pulling a tooth. It rends life from life and cannot possibly leave one unscathed.

This is not a decision that should be made under pressure from boyfriends who are not ready to be fathers, from society’s expectations, and with rising levels of hysteria, yet those are usually the circumstances under which it is made. A woman should be empowered to choose long before she gets pregnant, she should be equipped with the understanding that she is much more than “just” a potential baby-making machine.

She can choose to say no to pressure to have sex with anyone, especially people in positions of authority using sex for barter trade. She can learn self-defense. She can choose to use contraception if she doesn’t want to get pregnant, and there should be a provision for her to learn about different methods and choose what fits her best. And she should be allowed to be sad and vulnerable and scared and doubtful when she gets an unwanted pregnancy, without being judged and pointed fingers at.

So in that sense, I’m both pro-life and pro-choice. I don’t want anyone to have to die; the baby, or the misused woman, but I also don’t want anyone to be backed into a corner and be lied to that they have the choice to either live or be lived for. Refuse the lies, mwananchi, that a death of some kind has to occur.