A STUDY into the birth practices of conservative apostolic sects, conducted by OPHID in 2014, revealed that members consider the Holy Spirit to be the guiding force in healing. Illness, according to the study, is considered to have a spiritual cause and modern healthcare is seen as “heathen”. A lot of deaths have been recorded at apostolic centres, most of which could have been avoided by following standard procedure.
Apostolic sects are widespread in Buhera and other districts, and according to the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat), 38% of Zimbabwean women belong to apostolic sects and 74% of these live in rural areas. In all this, teenage mothers, mostly, have succumbed to the unhealthy conditions of giving birth while outside proper care facilities like clinics and hospitals. ZimStat, the statistics agency, says the maternal mortality rate — the number of women who die while pregnant or from causes related to pregnancy within 42 days after birth — was 516 per 100 000 live births in 2012.
A June 2023 report on National Assessment on Adolescent Pregnancies in Zimbabwe by Unicef shows that religion influences people’s knowledge and practices on uptake of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), especially use of contraception. The research revealed that most of the adolescent girls of the apostolic religion — 49% — had no access to SRHR. In 2021, Memory Machaya, a 14-year-old child bride in Marange, Manicaland province, died while giving birth.
[paywall]
Her death cast light on the practice of child marriage within Zimbabwe’s apostolic sect, which often rejects medicine and hospital treatment. Many campaigns against this practice in apostolic sects have been launched, with calls for them to adopt safer ways of childbirth. In response to that, the Vadzidzi vaJesu apostolic sect, warming up to calls to upscale child birth in a bid to save lives that were being lost unnecessarily, opened a clinic, the Centre Zimbabwe Africa (CZA) Clinic in 2022.
[/paywall]
