by Jane Gabriel
"I am a man out of a woman" -
so began the rallying cry of one of women's human rights lifelong
advocates, Professor Fred Sai, at the opening of the world's first International Conference on Safe Abortion (MSI Global Safe Abortion Conference).
The numbers of women dying are appalling:
100 million women alive today will have an unsafe abortion and more
than 13% of them will die as a direct result. 68,000 women die a year
as a direct result of an unsafe abortion - that is one woman every 8 minutes. Of the 42 million known abortions a year, 20 million of them
will be unsafe. Professor Sai came from Ghana to London as a medical
student in 1949, one of the nurses he trained with at the time became
pregnant, she swallowed sleeping pills and died weeks later. He asked
himself "What kind of law leads to this lonely death?" That was
the point at which Professor Sai decided that his life's work would
be to provide safe abortion.
Nearly 60 years later, the numbers
of women dying and being injured by unsafe abortions are still rising.
But Professor Sai has not given up. Today he is adviser to the president
of Ghana and the World Bank. Addressing the conference he came
up with an unlikely metaphor for those who work with women dying the
loneliest and most painful deaths, he said "Its like talking to a
choir, it should never stop practising" and called on the delegates
to ask themselves "Is our music resonating with those we want to hear?" as well as changingtheir tunes to reach out to new audiences.
