Questions Raised about Charges of Forced Abortion in Nigeria

By | December 15, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 16 (C-Fam) A recent report from Reuters alleges that more than 10,000 illegal abortions have been carried out by the Nigerian military since 2013, some by force, others by a lack of informed consent.  Many of the women and girls became pregnant through rape by Islamist militant groups in the northern part of the country.

The Nigerian military strongly denies the claims, and has argued that such a program could not have been carried out without the knowledge of aid groups, including UN agencies, that are operating in the area. Such groups as the UN Population Fund, Marie Stopes International and dozens of other pro-abortion groups have been present in the area for decades.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on Nigeria to investigate the forced abortion allegations.  In response, Nigerian defense chief Lucky Irabor called such an investigation a waste of time, dismissing the story as untrue.  Nigerian officials pointed out that numerous, perhaps more than 200, international and local aid organizations, as well as UN agencies, are working in the region and it would be difficult to conceal a nine-year program of forced abortions.

If the Reuters story proves to be true, it raises many questions, including who knew and why this was not reported earlier. The program is said to have run for ten years.

This is not the first time the issue of abortion has been raised with regard to the situation in northern Nigeria, where conflicts involving Boko Haram and other insurgent groups have been occurring since 2011.  As reports of kidnappings and rapes of women and girls emerged, international abortion groups saw an opportunity to advance their cause.

Abortion is illegal in Nigeria except to save the life of the mother.  When 276 female students were kidnapped by the insurgent group Boko Haram in Borno State, abortion activists wrote op-eds in Cosmopolitan and Ms. Magazine calling for Nigeria to change its laws and for international NGOs to provide abortions in Nigeria. Abortion groups like the U.S.-based Global Justice Center campaigned for the repeal or redefinition of the Helms Amendment, which bans U.S. funding for international abortions.

While these campaigns focused on abortion as a choice, which is far from what the Nigerian military is alleged to have done, the Reuters story notes that the abortion drug misoprostol is available “through unofficial abortion-drug distribution networks” in Nigerian cities.  Women were allegedly given misoprostol and other abortifacient drugs without their consent and without explanation.

In 2020, the Center for Reproductive Rights published a research paper on the northeast Nigerian conflict and its effects on the “sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls.” The pro-abortion legal organization interviewed hundreds of women and girls as well as UN agency representatives, government officials, and civil society workers.  The issue of forced abortion appears only once in the paper, in a list of acts said to be prohibited in customary international humanitarian law.  There is no mention of it arising in any of the interviews, and the paper focuses instead on the denial of abortion by aid organizations operating in accordance with Nigerian law and funding restrictions around U.S. foreign aid for abortions.

An important driving force behind the alleged forced abortion campaign is the stigma that falls on children born of wartime rape in many settings.  Efforts to raise the plight of these children at the UN and elsewhere have been complicated by the powerful international abortion lobby, which seeks to promote abortion as a solution to wartime rape and as a way to lobby countries to liberalize their abortion laws more generally.

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