Between Law and Life: The Grey Realities of Abortion in Nigeria
In Nigeria today, a woman’s uterus is both a site of life and a battleground of law. The recent debate in the Senate over a bill proposing harsher penalties for abortion re-ignited a familiar national anxiety. Yet, in the midst of the tension, something important happened: the Senate demonstrated courage by stepping back to re-examine laws that affect vulnerable girls and women, acknowledging the complexity of issues such as defilement, abduction, and mental health.
This pause is significant. It shows empathy, a willingness to modernise outdated frameworks, and a commitment to protecting lives, especially survivors whose realities do not fit neatly into black-and-white laws. It is a moment worth recognising. This is also a moment that invites us to look deeper.
Under Nigeria’s colonial-era laws, which we mostly operate by today, abortion is only permissible to save the life of a woman. That is what the law books say. But the law is silent about what “saving her life” truly means. Does a life need to be slipping away on a hospital bed before it is considered endangered? Or does mental health count? What of a 14-year-old girl, impregnated through sexual abuse and depravity by her father, whose body is too small and mind too broken to bear the weight of forced motherhood?
Would the law save her life?
Too often, the debate around abortion in Nigeria is stripped of its human face and reduced to moral and legal abstractions. Yet, in between those rigid boundaries lie real women, actual human beings, frightened, bleeding, judged, and often left alone to make impossible choices.
What is “Lawful” and “Unlawful?
We like to think of abortion laws as clear, moral codes. They are not. They are often confusing, outdated, and out of touch with public health realities. We cannot continue to recycle moral panic as policy. We call it “protecting morality,” or “preserving values,” when in fact, we are endangering life, the lives of women. For we have to ask ourselves, what exactly is “lawful” when a woman must prove she is dying before accessing help? What is “unlawful” when the law forces survivors of rape and incest to carry pregnancies that will traumatize them for life? And who decides when we draw a black or white line in the midst of a grey situation?
The Question of Consent, Proof, and Cruelty
When a teenager becomes pregnant after sexual violence and abuse, society rushes to ask, “Why didn’t she take precautions?” As though anyone plans to be raped. As though minors negotiate consent. As though “precaution” is a word that belongs in conversations about violence. We have heard, “After the rape, she should have taken an emergency pill”. We have to agree that only those who have not walked that route say such things. For the average Nigerian’s mantra is, “God forbid. It can never be me”.
We live in a society that questions the victim before it questions the system. When a child reports incest, the world demands evidence. When she shows up pregnant, the world demands endurance. And when she seeks to end that pregnancy, the law demands her life.
This is the grey that no one wants to confront, the moral fog where women’s health is debated by those who will never live with its consequences. We cannot continue to treat women’s bodies like battlegrounds, defining their boundaries with ink and judgment, yet rarely compassion.
This is precisely why the Senate’s recent decision offers an opportunity. By choosing caution over haste, lawmakers affirmed their responsibility to protect vulnerable groups, and this same spirit of compassion and evidence-based policymaking can guide a review of pregnancy-termination laws, especially for survivors of sexual violence.
Reforming these laws is not about ending life; it is about saving it. It is about ensuring that the legal system sees the full spectrum of health, physical, emotional, and mental. It is about creating laws that understand the realities of rape, incest, and medical emergencies. And it is about crafting responses rooted in empathy rather than punishment.
When Laws Force Women Underground
Restrictive abortion laws have never stopped abortions; they have only made them deadly. Across hospitals and communities, health workers continue to witness the silent casualties, young girls poisoned by unsafe concoctions, women bleeding in backrooms, and human beings who have lives, lost to entirely preventable infections.
The Grey is Where We Must Begin
Women’s reproductive health is not black and white. It is layered with the realities of poverty, violence, stigma, and choice, or in this case, the lack of it. It is shaped by systems that fail to protect and laws that refuse to evolve. The question, then, is not whether abortion is lawful or unlawful, but whether the law itself is humane. If the goal of the law is to protect human rights, laws must be humane, human-centered.
If the goal of governance is to preserve life, then our abortion laws must start from empathy, not punishment. The law and lawmakers must recognize that health is more than just survival; it is the right to live free from pain, fear, and shame.
The Nigerian Senate’s decision to pause the bill is not just a procedural moment. It is an invitation. It is a chance for us to confront our own contradictions. To rewrite laws that speak to lived realities. Because when it comes to women’s health, the grey areas are not the problem. They are the truth. Nigeria does not need confrontation. We need honest dialogue, informed by science, compassion, and lived experience. We need laws that acknowledge that women’s lives do not unfold in neat categories. And until our laws learn to honour that truth, they will continue to fall short of protecting those they claim to safeguard.