JINHA

NEWS CENTER – With likely hundreds of the women rescued from Boko Haram captivity in Nigeria's Sambisa Forest earlier this month pregnant from rape, it has emerged that U.S. law contributes to their inability to access abortions.

At the beginning of May, the Nigerian army reached more than 700 women and children as they advanced on Boko Haram camps in the Sambisa Forest. While the exact number of pregnant captives is not known, many women and girls are pregnant from rape and some have given birth already. As an article in Cosmopolitan points out, one reason that there is no talk of abortion services for the women is U.S. policy. Being forced to give birth to children of rape poses serious psychological challenges for the women alongside the physical challenges of giving birth in a country with one of the world's highest maternal mortality rates.

Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, says that although abortion is illegal in Nigeria, it is possible in cases of rape. One of the main blocks in the way of the women's right to an abortion, Serra says, is not Nigerian law, but U.S. law: the 1973 Helms Amendment, which forbids U.S. money from being used for abortions. This means that health NGOs operating in the camp, many of whom get their budgets at least in part from U.S. funding, do not provide abortion services.

"What the U.S. government does is allow the extreme politicization of abortion in the United States to dictate how they're responding in this kind of crisis, which to me is unconscionable," said Serra. She called for the women to be given access to full reproductive services, including access to abortion, immediately.

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