The news editor of Zambia’s largest independent newspaper is on trial for distributing obscene images. Pornography is illegal in Zambia, and Chansa Kabwela faces five years in prison if convicted.
The ‘obscene’ images? A mother in labor, the baby in breech, its entire body already outside the mother, but its head trapped. The baby eventually suffocated. Family members took the photographs as the woman lay on the grounds of Lusaka’s main hospital, unaided by any medical personnel as her child died. Outraged, Kabwela sent these photographs to Zambia’s vice-president, health minister and various rights groups to call attention to issues in the healthcare system as well as to call for an end to the nurses’ strike in the country. The Zambian president, Rupiah Banda, immediately labeled the pictures pornographic and the trial began.
Labeling the
photographs pornographic is simply ludicrous, worthy of almost no discussion.
The images, however, certainly are obscene. It is obscene that a woman should
be left on the ground at a hospital without medical help. It is obscene that a
child was allowed to die needlessly, when it could have been saved by a simple
operation. But it is a shameful
travesty that those in the position to do something about a system that allowed
this to happen choose to hide their heads in the sand. As if condemning reality
will make it disappear.
These images
have generated anger and repulsion; to have it be so misdirected as to
prosecute the responsible disseminator of these on porn charges is a massive
step backwards in the fight for maternal health and gender equality in Zambia. As
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof wrote in a July 2009 column,
maternal mortality does not have to be an unfortunate given, a phenomenon that
must be accepted. If men had uteruses and paternal mortality were a risk,“‘paternity wards’ would get resources, ambulances would transport
pregnant men to hospitals free of charge, deliveries would be free, and the
Group of 8 industrialized nations would make paternal mortality a top priority.”
Women are allowed to die in childbirth all around the world
simply because they are women; disposable and voiceless as they are often
forced to be, the political will simply does not extend to protecting them when
their health is at its most vulnerable and precarious stage.
These Zambian
politicians feel very self-righteous about ignoring the tragedy of inadequate
maternal healthcare that is staring them in the face in graphic detail. One wonders what the reaction would have
been if that woman had been a man instead; would the anger finally become a
constructive force for the improvement of healthcare in Zambia?
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