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Whose Right to Life? Reading Kenya’s Abortion Ruling Through Mad Women
Last week, while writing about Joan Thatiah’s Mad Women, I returned again and again to Zawadi, a young woman whose life ends after a clandestine abortion in a residential apartment. This week, reality has caught up with literature. The Court of Appeal in Kenya has overturned the 2022 High Court decision that had recognised access to abortion under limited constitutional circumstances, holding instead that abortion is not a standalone fundamental right under the Constitution of Kenya 2010.
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These are not just stories, they are recognisable and lived realities. The topic of abortion remains a hushed one spoken in codes and euphemisms on platforms like TikTok, where creators, anonymous or not, refer to pregnancy as “the stranger in my womb”, quietly building communities of support for women navigating impossible choices.
The CS Interior had termed the exercise an internal affair, which was still at a premature stage, and claimed that bringing the matter to light would only help fan flames of malevolence from the rest of Kenyans.
In a region where loss, resilience, and survival are tightly interwoven, stories such as Rough Silk carry a particular weight. They speak not only to personal journeys, but to collective histories shaped by adversity.
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights claimed it had received preliminary information from an anonymous witness that the Kenya Defence Forces were, for several weeks, on the offensive towards civilian locals in El Adde before the massacre.
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights claimed it had received preliminary information from an anonymous witness that the Kenya Defence Forces were, for several weeks, on the offensive towards civilian locals in El Adde before the massacre.
Published barely eleven years after Kenya’s independence, the novel entered a society that was undergoing rapid transformation. Women were beginning to occupy offices, secretarial pools, and professional spaces in greater numbers. Yet with that entry into the workforce came complicated negotiations of power—between ambition and vulnerability, between economic independence and social expectation.
