A Moroccan teenager has died following a clandestine abortion in a village in a rural region of the country, local media reported on Wednesday, sparking outrage from feminist NGOs. The 14-year-old girl was buried on Tuesday, September 13, in the village of Boumia, in the province of Midelt (southeast), according to a video from Chouf TV, a web-tv, present on the spot. “The abortion took place at the home of a young man who sexually exploited the victim,” said Tuesday in a press release a coalition of Moroccan feminist associations, “Spring of Dignity”.
Following the tragedy, the Royal Gendarmerie arrested “the victim’s mother, a nurse and the owner of the house where the clandestine abortion took place”, said the public channel 2M. A fourth suspect was then arrested on suspicion of having “provided assistance during the abortion” according to the same source, which adds that the prosecution’s investigation is continuing.
“This tragedy is the consequence of an accumulation of institutionalized violence suffered by women”, says feminist activist Betty Lachgar. “We hold the State fully responsible for pushing women and girls to resort to clandestine unsafe abortion, whatever the circumstances in which the pregnancy took place, without taking into account the suffering of women and daughters in the event of an unwanted pregnancy”, blame the coalition “Spring of Dignity”in a press release published by Yabiladi.
Voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) remains punishable by six months to five years in prison in Morocco. The penal code sanctions both the woman who aborts (from six months to two years in prison) and those who practice the act (from one to five years in prison). Morocco had engaged in 2015 in a deep debate on “the emergency” a relaxation of its legislation in the face of the scourge of hundreds of clandestine abortions performed every day, in sometimes disastrous sanitary conditions.
An official commission immediately recommended that abortion in “some cases of force majeure” becomes authorized, in particular in the event of rape or serious malformations. No law has since come to endorse these recommendations ardently supported by defenders of women’s rights.