If I never found Kiota – if I was left to my own devices – I would probably just have gone along with the abortion. I had no one to turn to,” Mercy, a beneficiary of the Kiota Rescue Centre says. Kiota, is a rescue centre for vulnerable pregnant women and girls in Muranga.
Mercy was only 18, when she first got pregnant, terrified and confused she confided in her mother who sent her away to distant relatives only to call two days later with an ultimatum: If she wanted to come back home, she had to get rid of it. Mercy, not amused by the idea, decided to call her then boyfriend, who supported her mother’s decision and even offered to pay for the procedure.
Janet is another victim who on a very early morning began the journey to an unremarkable shack in Kibera, Nairobi. For 500/- she was given a strange black liquid that was to end her ‘woes’. Two hours later Janet lay sprawled on her bedroom floor, bleeding uncontrollably. A back-alley abortionist had terminated her pregnancy and left her for dead once she had been paid.
“I was scared at the beginning but I was desperate,” says Janet, five years later at age 22. “We were poor and we could not afford to take care of another child, and my boyfriend had disowned me and the baby.” Janet was not as ‘lucky’ as mercy. So who or what is Kiota?
Kiota means ‘nest’ in Swahili, and indicates that the rescue centre is a place where young women can go to nurture their pregnancies and be cared for. The rescue centre has two branches. The first kiota is a bungalow donated by a well-wisher in the Kiambuthia area of Murang’a. The second is in Kwale in Kilifi County. They are, quite literally, temporary homes for vulnerable pregnant women and girls who have been rejected by their families.
“It was after years of seeing first-hand the suffering and the devastation of girls and women who had had abortions that I decided that there had to be a way out of it,” says Dr Jean Kaggia, a Nairobi-based obstetrician and gynaecologist who is the founder of the kiotas.
First, she founded the Protecting Life Movement Trust in the year 2000 together with a group of churches and Para-Church organisations. Its goal was to talk to communities about abortion and the negative effects it has on a woman.
“There was still a problem, as the society was still rejecting pregnant girls and women. So I decided to set up Kiota as a social solution because crisis pregnancies are a social problem not a medical one,” she says.
The first Kiota rescue centre was set up in April of 2011. Since then, they have had 95 deliveries. It is a community based initiative meaning that most of what they have here is donated by the community around them, including the cow and the chickens. The young women and girls share the house chores and during their free time, they are given life and entrepreneurial skills like bead work and detergent making. Recently, another well-wisher donated an acre of land where they are fund raising to build a permanent rescue home.
In 2013, these illegal practices were recognised as a “preventable cause of maternal morbidity and mortality” by the Ministry of Health, which urged the country to find “lasting solutions. But, despite Constitutional change in pursuit of these ends, unsafe abortion accounts for up to 40 per cent of all maternal deaths in Kenya. This mostly owing that we (as a society) still view it as a taboo discussion while it’s killing our society. Fear, stigma and religion have hindered discussion of these solutions in Kenya, where resistance to abortion remains widespread. Increasing the disconnect between rescue centres such as Kiota and vulnerable pregnant women.
The Kenyan society is very conservative. We rarely make a radical move. Doctors, off the camera, are performing abortion a lot in Kenya for those who can afford it. To curb the killer of unsafe abortion, Kenya must adopt a multilateral approach to reproductive health rights that moves the focus from unsafe abortions to unwanted pregnancies.