2023-04-28 04:59:20
Except in cases of danger to the health of the mother, abortions are not authorized in Morocco. A Moroccan doctor and his assistant were arrested on Thursday in the act of attempting to abort a 15-year-old girl. The arrest took place in a private clinic in Meknes (north of the country) by agents of the anti-gang brigade of the local police headquarters, according to a police source.
The doctor and his assistant, aged 71 and 64 respectively, were taken into custody. The teenager and her mother, as well as a woman from their entourage who accompanied them, were made available to the judicial investigation, added the police source, without further details.
“A 15-year-old girl who is trying to end a pregnancy in decent sanitary conditions (…) When will this masquerade end? “, protested the feminist collective “Hors-la-Loi” (@MoroccanOutlaws), which campaigns for the decriminalization of abortion and the protection of individual freedoms in Morocco.
“What do they want, the 15-year-old girl to keep the child? Or that his mother takes him to see a charlatan? Or that she ends up killing herself? What is the goal by the way! “Denounced on Twitter Narjis Benazzou, an activist of the collective.
In the kingdom, a woman who aborts is liable to six months to two years in prison, and people who have performed an abortion from one to five years in prison.
Some 600 to 800 clandestine abortions are practiced every day in Morocco, according to associations which campaign for its legalization.
Fight against sometimes disastrous sanitary conditions
In 2015, the country embarked on a vast debate on the “urgency” of relaxing its legislation in the face of the scourge of clandestine abortions, performed in sometimes disastrous sanitary conditions. An official commission had in the process recommended that abortion become authorized in “certain cases of force majeure”, in particular in the event of rape or serious malformations of the fetus.
But no law has since come to endorse these recommendations ardently supported by women’s rights activists.
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