Last year was a moment of triumph over adversity for Alinafe, an underage survivor of sexual violence who challenged a law made by an all-male British Parliament in 1868 and imported to Malawi in 1925. Rewind to October 28 2025. A sunny Tuesday.
New lawmakers are taking oaths at Parliament in Lilongwe while Judge Michael Tembo is passing his verdict on the defiled girl’s right to safe abortion. Malawi’s Parliament has sidestepped abortion issues for 61 years of self-rule—but not the 15-year-old opposed to unsafe abortion, which causes up to 18 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in Malawi, according to Ministry of Health. She is in Standard Seven, learning about British missionaries who brought Christianity, colonial rule and laws a clinician quoted for refusing to terminate her unwanted pregnancy.
The judge finds it “harsh and inhumane” for the caregiver at Chileka Health Centre to insist that such a girl keeps the pregnancy. “It is, therefore, only logical and in accordance with her sexual and reproductive health rights that such a girl be allowed, without let or hindrance, to demand—if she so wishes—access to abortion services,” he rules. The brave girl defiled by a man almost four times her age personifies how girls in Malawi often suffer abuse from people and systems that should protect them.
[paywall]
The ruling reaffirms young survivors’ right to demand safe abortion from both private and public clinics. This excites campaigners against penal laws that only allow doctors to terminate a pregnancy to save a woman’s life. “Clinging to outdated laws only pushes women to procure backstreet abortion using life-threatening methods,” says activist Emma Kaliya.
That it took a teenager in agony to revist the law exposes how lawmakers have slept on the job since independence. Similarly, it took street vendor Mayeso Gwanda to scrap another colonial law that restricted poor majority’s freedom of movement to daytime, normalising arbitrary arrests dusk till dawn. This shows the divide between politicians elected to make laws that reflect public interest and the harsh realities of people they ought to represent.
When parliamentarians doze off, ordinary citizens suffer the crushing squeeze of bad laws, while frustrated folks turn to courts for relief. Members of Parliament in the country cannot keep burying their heads like ostriches when abortion issues come their way.
[/paywall]
