The proposed revision of the Penal Code, agreed on Tuesday at a meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet) in Maputo, includes measures to make it easier for women to receive legal abortions.Speaking on Thursday at a press conference, the head of the government’s Legal Reform Technical Unit (UTREL), Abdul Carimo, said that abortion should be legal and carried out in the public health service by doctors.The government wants to cut the number of illegal abortions that endanger the lives of women and have become a public health problem.“There are studies by the Institute of National Health that indicate that more than five thousand women die each year in Mozambique as a consequence of abortion”, said Carimo.Those that carry out illegal abortions face a penalty of between two and eight years in prison.The proposed changes would bring the Penal Code into line with the current reality.According to a report by the United Nations, “in 1981 the Ministry of Health issued a decree allowing abortions to be performed in hospitals in cases of endangerment of health and contraceptive failure. A committee was to make the decision as to whether legal grounds for abortion existed. Since then, the decree has been interpreted very liberally in some hospitals, and abortions are provided there to women who sign a written statement requesting the abortion”.However, many women do not know that abortions take place in public hospitals and resort to unsafe back-street abortions. The Ministry of Health has estimated these abortions account for 16 per cent of maternal deaths and 55 per cent of all admissions to hospital obstetric and gynaecological services.The changes to the Penal Code will be brought before parliament for debate later this year. The reform brings together all the changes to the Code made since national independence 36 years ago.In total, 399 articles have been altered, added or removed, which represents over 80 per cent of the Code inherited from the colonial era. It marks the end of the work on revising the Code, which began in 2005.
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