Resisting Reproduction: An Anthropological Analysis of Self- Induced Abortion in a Rural Ghanaian Village

Unsafe abortions claim the lives of thousands of women every year. Globally, women in Sub-Saharan Africa face the highest risk of death and injury from abortion-related complications. Current global and national efforts to reduce incidences of unsafe abortion are highly ineffective in the rural Ghanaian community where this research was undertaken because programmes of action fail to address patterns of gender violence and patriarchal control by medicalising women’s social suffering. Medical discourses and policy output about family planning and reproductive health, produced and reproduced at the level of the national body politic, in fact obscure more deeply embedded, powerful ideologies and social praxis about female sexuality and reproduction which are produced and reproduced within the context of popular interpretations of tradition and customary law. These aspects of the customary social structure and its current transformations, combine with economic hardship to dominate patterns of social relations in the village and thus, maintain the necessity for women to utilise a dangerous local plant in order to facilitate potentially fatal self-induced abortions as a means of resisting culturally-defined fertility patterns