Rabat – Outrage grew in Morocco after a 14-year-old girl lost her life to unsafe abortion, with several associations and activists, including the Spring of Dignity Alliance, calling for reform in the country’s abortion law, as well as access to safe and legal abortion.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Spring of Dignity Alliance said that the teenager, who lived in the town of Midelt, 200 kilometers south of Fez, underwent a “secret abortion.” The abortion was carried out by a midwife who works at the regional hospital in Midelt and a technician from Azrou hospital, who pretended to be a nurse, the statement added.
According to the association, the abortion took place at the house of the man “who deceived this girl and continued to sexually exploit her and is responsible for her pregnancy.”
The alliance denounced the “heinous act and the double violence that this girl was subjected to, including rape that resulted in pregnancy, and a clandestine abortion she underwent in unsafe conditions despite her deteriorating health condition.” The unsafe abortion resulted in “severe bleeding,” leading to her death, they added.
The association blamed the country’s laws for “pushing women and girls to resort to unsafe clandestine abortion regardless of the circumstances in which the pregnancy happened.” They highlighted the “suffering” women and girls go through in the event of an unwanted pregnancy.
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In a bid to “limit the recurrence of the tragedy,” the association demanded a “radical and comprehensive” reform in Morocco’s criminal law in terms of “philosophy, structure, language.” The statement stressed that the law should be in line with the constitution, as well as international covenants.
The association also called for decriminalizing “medical abortion” and regulating it within a public health code that aligns with the World Health Organization’s recommendations.
Abortion should become a “public service for women to benefit from whenever the pregnancy poses a threat to their physical, psychological, mental or social health,” it argued, calling for abolishing the provisions relating to abortion in the country’s Criminal Code.
Article 453 of the Moroccan penal code criminalizes abortion, except in cases where the mother’s life is at risk. In such cases, abortion can be legally practiced, but with the husband’s permission.
The Spring of Dignity concluded their statement by calling for the development of a “plan” to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to grant girls and women access to sex education.
Moroccan Outlaws 490, a group that calls for abolishing article 490 of the Moroccan penal code which criminalizes sex before marriage, also denounced the death of the 14-year-old girl, lamenting that such tragic and preventable losses might continue as between 600 to 800 clandestine abortions occur in Morocco every day.
