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The abortion rights defender using social media to educate mothers
Gaopalelwe Phalaetsile, the founder of Feminist Mommy, a social media platform that grew into a digital space for motherhood stories.
What you need to know:
- The voices of women who demand safe abortions, several of whom were impregnated from rape, rarely suffice.
- They are always silenced by a merciless population that remains indifferent and non-empathetic.
In the educational manual Abortion Services and Reproductive Justice in Rural South Africa, the vast nation is listed 10th in the world's murder rankings, with 45 daily killings on average.
South Africa is the global leader in violence against women, with a woman or girl, reported raped every four minutes, and every eight hours a woman is murdered by her male partner.
The scourge is so disturbing that local women's rights leaders coined the phrase “intimate femicide” to define it.
In Africa's salacious culture of violence, men are desensitised to the affliction they cause women.
Notions of masculinity are so perverted, battering and raping women are accepted as cultural norms, while victims of unwanted pregnancies are barred from receiving safe reproductive rights.
The voices of women who demand safe abortions, several of whom were impregnated from rape, rarely suffice.
They are always silenced by a merciless population that remains indifferent and non-empathetic.
This persistently casts aspersions and demonises girls and women who require human rights service while handling the physical and mental challenges that accompany their pregnancies, including post-traumatic stress disorder, often resulting from rape perpetrated by relatives.
Abortion was begrudgingly legalised by the Pretoria legislature in 1996 under the Choice of Termination of Pregnancy Act, which was signed by Nelson Mandela in February 1997.
The cover of Abortion Services and Reproductive Justice in Rural South Africa, an educational manual.
Unfortunately, the execution and implementation of the law has been moribund because of an impractical conservative and religiously driven population.
Gaopalelwe Phalaetsile is the non-executive board member and founder of Abortion Support South Africa, an organisation that provides telemedical abortion services across South Africa and the continent.
She's also the digital campaign manager at Oxfam South Africa and founder of Feminist Mommy, a social media platform that grew into a digital space for motherhood stories.
She grew up in a township village in North West province called Monakato, 14 minutes from the infamous Rustenburg. A platinum mining town notorious for its excessive reports of violence against women.
Gaopalelwe, a charismatic personality, expresses in exceptionally humane and benevolent desperation the plight of women who demand safe abortion services.
She has insistently championed solutions to safe abortions since going public about surviving an unsafe abortion in 2009.
When she was 19, during her freshman year in journalism school at Witwatersrand University, Gaopalelwe was raped and impregnated.
She decided to procure an abortion. She lived with her temperamental father during her studies.
He was a typical traditional African man who was stoic to her pleas, opposed abortions and had no empathy for her daughter surviving rape.
Gaopalelwe braved the trauma from the infliction and sought an abortion.
She visited a Jo'burg hospital and was placed on a long waiting list before realising that by the time her turn would commence, she'd be past her first trimester, which would make the abortion riskier. Worsening her pain was obstetric violence from a nurse who angrily demonised her.
Read: The battle over abortion
She then came across a pamphlet that advertised for abortions in Joburg's most infamous neighbourhood, Hillbrow.
She toured the under-resourced and unregulated facility, located in a flat and received the most excruciating experience during her abortion procedure.
She was extremely fortunate to survive and through the post-abortion trauma, she felt violated, knowing what happened to her was unjust.
She decided to raise the alarm as it dawned on her that South Africa was in dire need of reforms to allow access to safe terminations and reproductive services.
She launched Abortion Support South Africa in 2011. It raised the need for more facilities to induce safe second trimester abortions.
Abortion Support South Africa also directs girls and women to hospitals where they can safely receive specialised care, devoid of obstetric violence.
From 2018, Gaopalelwe has held intense campaigns with Global Health Strategies on safe abortions, and compelled the Zuma and Ramaphosa administrations to take the safety of women seeking abortion services seriously.
Abortion Support South Africa partnered with Safe Abortion Action Fund, which globally provides funding and support to organisations working to improve access to first and second trimester terminations.
During the South African Gender Summit in 2018, Gaopalelwe demanded the creation of the National Strategic Plan to emphasise solutions to inequality, gender-based violence and poverty, all of which contribute to making reproductive services inaccessible.
She wrote about her story on the organisation's Facebook page and it culminated in a flood of messages from women requesting support in locating safe abortion facilities.
Several marginalised women are too impoverished to negotiate condom and contraceptive use with their partners, because of entrenched patriarchy and a legacy of gender-based violence.
They also have no dignified access to reproductive services. Gaopalelwe affirms that women require safe abortions and will always demand the services regardless of what society believes.
She recognises that we don't live in a bubble, like purists who affirm that abstinence is the solution to pregnancies.
We live on a continent where sexual violence by fathers, uncles, brothers and teachers are habitual and worsened by a broken healthcare system that fails to deliver secure services.
The writer is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Center (@jeffbigbrother)
