Imposition of Abortion on Africa is "Cultural Supremacy"

13.07.2017

Western governments are “spitting in the face” of African democracy by trying to impose legal abortion against the wishes of most of the people in such countries, according to a Nigerian pro-life campaigner.

Uju Ekeocha, the founder of Culture of Life Africa, a UK-based pro-life group, said wealthy nations pumping money into the promotion and funding of abortions in Africa were behaving like “old colonial masters.”

“In all my work with African countries, I don’t know of any which is screaming, ‘Come and help us, we have this abortion crisis,’” said Ekeocha, a Catholic who has dual citizenship in Britain and Nigeria. “But a lot of Western countries, in this spirit of cultural supremacy, are still trying to impose abortion in this way.”

Ekeocha, a biomedical scientist who has lived in Worcester, England, since 2006, said Africans are using Western funds “to bribe politicians.” Abortion “is against the will of the people,” she said. “The polls show overwhelmingly that Africans hate abortion, abhor abortion, both women and men.

“By ignoring the will of the people, this is spitting in the face of the very type of democracy we are supposed to have in African countries,” she said.

Ekeocha spoke as the British government co-hosted an international Family Planning Summit in London with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations Population Fund. Priti Patel, the UK secretary of state for international development, announced 11 July that Britain would increase spending on overseas family planning services, including “safe abortions,” to £1.125 billion (€1.275 bn) over the next five years.

Ekeocha told CNS that since Trump withdrew US funding, Canada was now at the forefront of exporting abortions overseas. “Canada has taken that position as the number 1 cultural colonial master in the world,” she said.

“They need to go back to the integral care of the person, where they were thinking of the Africans not as people who they can colonize culturally and impose their new views and values on them, but as a people who have their own views and values,” she said. “What Africans want more than anything is for women to give birth safely ... in a lot of these countries they can’t even get the most basic health care.”

The Tablet. July 12.