Not yet one nation under God

Gilbert Juma Barasa began his seven-year jail term on Friday as the Catholic Church wound down its weeklong campaign against the Reproductive Health Bill, which is due in Parliament.

Any time now, John Cardinal Njue will be leading a procession of Catholics to oppose the enactment of the law on reproductive health and rights, ostensibly because it supports abortion.

Barasa, a one-time messenger at the Siaya district hospital, had morphed into a clinical officer at Nairobi’s Kibera slums without the benefit of training, and was offering medical services on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis.

Five years ago, he met a distressed woman, accepted Sh300 from her — a quarter of what he would usually charge — and attempted to terminate her pregnancy.

It ended in tragedy at Kenyatta National Hospital where Veronica Ndunge died. She is one of 300,000 women who receive post-abortion care services at public hospitals each year.

It is not clear if Ndunge was a Catholic, but had she not been a poor woman living at Kibera, she might be alive today. She conceived perhaps because she did not have sufficient knowledge or access to family planning services. At the time she was offering her last Sh300 to someone she believed could help her.

At the lower end of the economic ladder, reproductive health choices are constricted. In this environment, people like Barasa, whose intimate acquaintance with medicine are saviours of sorts.

The Reproductive Health and Rights Bill, published in June 2008, sets out its objectives as protecting and promoting the reproductive health rights of all persons, promoting the health of women as well as safe motherhood, reducing the deaths of women in maternity, and ensuring access to quality and comprehensive provision of family planning services.

It also seeks to prevent Female Genital Mutilation and to ensure that those who have undergone it receive the necessary medical care to address their reproductive health consequences and to make rules for providing adolescents in need with reproductive health services.

Reproductive health was also on the international agenda this week, when the United Nations Population Fund released its report, saying that culture gives great power to men, and that they must play a leading role in securing these rights for women.

Since Bill was placed in the public domain, the Church has called its soldiers to battle.

A clause-by-clause analysis of the Bill by Southern Cross Bioethics Institute at the best of Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in the United Kingdom is now doing the rounds on the Internet.

John Cardinal Njue has also weighed in with a pastoral letter. Their arguments are well-considered and shrill – the proposed legislation is an attempt to legalise murder, kill unborn children and entrench homosexuality against the natural order.

The Catholic Church, which has some 12.5 million baptized members or 33 per cent of the population in Kenya, might want to brand women like Ndunge as irresponsible sinners who pursue sexual pleasure without responsibility.

It might even preach that such women deserve to live miserably thereafter or die if they want to. The church is free to preach a moral code as strict as its members are willing to live by.

But it has no business attempting to lord it over the 67 per cent Kenyans who are not fortunate to be Catholics. It has no right – moral or otherwise – to put the lives of women in danger because it requires them to live by a universal moral code they do not subscribe to.

It has no authority to deny education about sexuality and health to adolescents under the pretext of protecting them while only setting traps for them to err so that no help can be offered to them.

The Catholic Church has a large following. It does many good deeds – among them building and running schools and hospitals around the world.