WOMEN SILENCED ON ABORTION

Why is nobody in the Swazi media talking to the women at the centre of the present abortion coverage?

We have NGOs, police officers, ‘Christians’ and other assorted moralists, but we haven’t heard a word from the women themselves.

The discovery of more than 100 foetuses, found dumped in a stream in Matsapha, has forced Swazis to confront a truth they would rather not face. Lots of women have abortions even though in Swaziland abortions are illegal (although the Swazi Constitution allows them in extreme cases of rape and incest).

It is not only Swazis who won’t face the truth about abortion: the media don’t want to know either.

For those who have not been paying attention here’s a recap of what’s been going on.

More than 100 foetuses have been found over a period of two weeks dumped in a stream in the industrial town of Matsapha. The Swazi News (22 September 2007) reported that a local resident had found the first lot of 71 foetuses bundled together in plastic bags. Other foetuses were later found.

All this led the Swazi News to speculate that there was ‘a secret backdoor abortion operation in Matsapha.’ The newspaper offered no evidence in its report to support this statement.

Speculation about where the foetuses came from spread alarmingly. The Swazi Observer (27 September 2007) accused a health shop in Manzini of being the source of the abortions.

According to its report, the health centre has a massager machine that pregnant women were using to terminate their unwanted pregnancies, by forcing miscarriages upon themselves. The report also stated that some people had bought massagers themselves and used them to perform backyard abortions for a fee.

The reports on the massager raise serious questions that the Observer does not answer. It does not name any of its sources for its information, nor did it track down any of the back street abortionists. The newspaper could not complain if its readers did not believe the story to be true. The readers’ suspicions may be well founded because no other media outlet (as far as I can see) followed up the massager angle.

I suspect that the reporter of the massager story also had his doubts since he reported claims that the machine had cured a woman of breast cancer and one person said the massager ‘helped him remove two bats from his body while another claims a pair of snails and maggots came out.’

A number of women work in local textile factories live close to the spot where the foetuses were found and suspicion immediately fell on them. One Member of Parliament (MP) speaking on SBIS radio (and reported in the Observer 27 September 2007) blamed the dumping of foetuses ‘on the lowly paid women at the industrial sites. He said most of them had to find ways of ridding themselves of unwanted pregnancies because of the economic consequences of seeing through such pregnancies.’

The Observer offered no evidence to support the MP’s view, even though the idea that ‘most of’ the women working in the textile factories needed to have abortions is patently absurd.

Even so, the idea that women working in textile factories aborted the foetuses has taken hold in the Swazi newspapers.

But nowhere among all the acres of newspaper that has been used on this story have we heard from the women in the textile factories themselves. And what about women who have had abortions? We know that many women have had abortions in Swaziland so why don’t the media talk to some of them about why they had them?

Without these voices the coverage of the abortion issue remains incomplete. We now know a number of people have been arrested in connection with the finding of the foetuses. It is likely that in due course there will be court cases and who knows maybe they will be sent to prison. I am sure all this will be covered in the media.

But unless the Swazi journalists make more effort to talk to the women at the centre of this story we are likely to only know what happened, but we will never discover why it happened.