Are abortion cases in Mwanza’s Sengerema Hospital on the rise?
How true is a claim that the number of abortion cases recorded in Sengerema Hospital have risen since 2017?
During an interview with journalists at Sengerema Hospital in Mwanza region, Maria Jose Voeten, the Chief Medical Doctor at Sengerema Hospital, claimed that between 600 to 700 abortion cases are recorded in the hospital annually.
Dr Voeten further added that it is difficult to determine if the abortions are induced or spontaneous, and the hospital’s priority is to save the woman’s life.
So the question is, have abortion cases in Sengerema risen over the past two years?
PesaCheck has looked into the claim that abortion cases have been on the rise at Sengerema Hospital since 2017 and finds it to be TRUE based on the following:
PesaCheck obtained statistics from Sengerema Hospital which show that abortion was the second leading cause of admission in the hospital in 2018 after malaria, with 850 admissions recorded in 2018. 552 abortion cases were recorded at the hospital in 2017, increasing by 10.9% to 612 in 2018.
While abortion is banned in Tanzania and is punishable by up to fourteen years in prison, research by Tanzania’s National Institute for Medical Research and Guttmacher Institute in 2013, unsafe abortions account for one-quarter of maternal deaths in the country.
The study also found that an estimated 405,000 women procured abortions in 2013, translating to 36 out of every 1000 women, which is higher than the sub-Saharan Africa rate of 31 per 1000 women.
A study published in the Lancet by World Health Organization (WHO) authors states that 25 million unsafe abortions were procured between 2010 and 2014, with 97 percent of these occurring in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
According to the Sengerema District Medical Officer Peter Mao, Sengerema Hospital does not have official statistics of unsafe abortion in Tanzania. However, Mao says that he is aware of several abortion cases in Sengerema.
“I once attended to a girl who used herbs to induce an abortion. In fact, there are some who use hospital drugs,” he said.
He said he has also witnessed a case of a woman who used a cassava stick to terminate a pregnancy.
Ms Modesta Masala, Health Consultant at Sengerema Hospital said they receive several cases of women who use herb with an abortion intention.
“We’ve seen cases where pregnant women use herbs to induce labour pains, and we suspect that they also use them to induce abortions”, Ms Masala added.
Research done by PesaCheck in Sengerema and some parts of Dar es Salaam revealed that there are various rumoured ways that women can and have used in the past to try to induce abortions.
One woman from Sengerema that we spoke to said she procured an abortion in 2017 after her boyfriend denied responsibility for the pregnancy. She boiled and consumed a herbal concoction, which induced severe stomach pain and bleeding.
Other methods of procuring abortions described by some of the women we spoke to on the matter are boiling and drinking a large quantity of strong tea made from black tea leaves, and mixing detergent with water and drinking the solution.
Additionally, we were informed that some women procure abortions in small dispensaries located in the outskirts of Dar es Salaam and other major urban areas, or buy over the counter drugs such as Misoprostol to induce abortions.
Dr Anna Temba from Population Services International says that women who procure unsafe abortions suffer several complications.
“Women with induced abortions may experience over bleeding, embolism, uterine rapture, and sepsis — a life threatening infection”, Dr Temba notes.
The growing number of abortion-related complications has led organizations such as UMATI (Chama cha Uzazi na Malezi Bora Tanzania) to offer comprehensive post-abortion care for free.
“It is very expensive”, Josephine Mugishagwe, a Media and Advocacy Officer at UMATI explains, “but we offer it for free in order to save more lives.”
Data shared by Sengerema hospital shows that the hospital recorded 552 and 612 abortion cases in 2017 and 2018 respectively. This makes the claim by Dr. Maria Jose Voeten that these numbers are on the rise TRUE.
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This report was written by PesaCheck Fellow Florence Majani, an award winning Tanzanian Data Journalist and Investigative Reporter. It was edited by PesaCheck Content Editor Ann Ngengere, and was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Eric Mugendi.
The infographics are by Sakina Salem, a Tanzanian graphic designer, visual artist and digital content producer.
PesaCheck, co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of so-called ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ or SDG public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage.
To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, in partnership with the International Budget Partnership (Kenya), with additional support from theInternational Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
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