ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—It’s the faces of the women and girls receiving treatment for botched abortions that still haunt nurse Hanna, 47 years into her nursing career.
“They had a look in their eyes. It was a plea to be saved from their misery,” she said in Amharic, during an interview last month.
This was in Ethiopia in the 1980s, and Hanna—whose name has been changed to protect her identity—had just started working in a hospital. She remembers having to remove grass, bits of wood, and dangerous chemical concoctions from her patients’ uteruses. She also remembers feeling helpless.
“We did everything we could at the time, antibiotics and all kinds of medications,” she said. “But we couldn’t save most of them. It would be too late by the time they came in. They’d go into septic shock.”
Abortion was illegal then. It was allowed only under one exception: to save a pregnant woman’s life. The result of the draconian legislation was the avoidable death of tens of thousands of women and girls. Between 1980 and 1999, a third of all maternal deaths in Ethiopia could be attributed to unsafe abortions. After decades of campaigning by healthcare workers, women’s rights groups, and lawyers, politicians—shamed into action by the death toll and disabilities resulting from unsafe abortions—reformed the law in 2005. Today, abortion is permissible in several more instances, including if pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Ethiopia, though still dealing with a high maternal mortality rate, became a success story: Facilities across this vast East African country began to provide abortion care, and by 2020, maternal mortality had dropped by 70 percent.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Today, anti-abortion disinformation—spread across social media and television—is influencing both public opinion and politics in Ethiopia, putting the hard-won gains of the past two decades at risk. Advocates and medical professionals are once again starting to speak up, this time in defense of the law.
Opposition to abortion has been intensifying. Anti-abortion campaigners argue that liberalizing the law was a “mistake,” said Abebe Shibru, a physician and the country director at MSI Reproductive Choices (MSI), an international nongovernmental organization that provides abortion and contraceptive services in Ethiopia.
Last year, he told two journalists whom I was working with that local activists who do not believe in a woman’s right to choose were adapting their tactics, increasingly inspired and influenced by the U.S. Christian right. “Before, the anti-choice groups were targeting the public, they were more visible, shouting, demonstrating and telling people abortion is a sin,” Shibru said. “Now they are targeting politicians, decision-makers, safe abortion practitioners—they are trying to cripple the system.”
In response, an umbrella organization called the Coalition of Comprehensive Abortion Care was established in 2019. It’s comprised of abortion service providers and aims to monitor disinformation and strengthen public support for access to safe abortions.
“We used to have a very quiet approach to providing abortion services. This is no longer an option,” Shibru said of the coalition, to which MSI Ethiopia belongs. “There is an organized movement to reverse this law, and the trends of the disinformation campaigns have forced us to take a vocal approach.”
Twenty years after Ethiopia became a “model” for abortion law reform, Shibru said that MSI has anecdotal evidence of an increase in post-abortion complications, suggesting that women are once again turning to unsafe methods to terminate pregnancies. The doctor suggested that this is linked to disinformation.
Opponents used to frame the campaign for safe abortions as part of a so-called Western agenda that threatened to erode Ethiopia’s religious and cultural values. But since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States, the messaging has shifted. Now, Shibru said, anti-abortion figures vehemently argue that Ethiopia should follow in the United States’ footsteps.
In recent months, the coalition has traced links between Ethiopian anti-abortion influencers and U.S.-based anti-abortion rights groups such as Family Watch International (FWI) and Heartbeat International. FWI has been designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit focused on advocacy in the American South, and Heartbeat International describes itself as working on making abortion “unthinkable.”
Both organizations are linked to United for Life Ethiopia, an organization that is run by a well-known surgeon and perhaps the most influential figure leading Ethiopia’s anti-abortion movement, physician Seyoum Antonios. Antonios, whose biography states his intention of “influencing policy discussions related to family and life issues,” is also head of the FWI’s Africa division. United for Life Ethiopia is listed on Heartbeat International’s “affiliate map”.
“Every day, 3,000 children are slaughtered. Is it a woman’s right to slaughter them?” Antonios asks in one of his many YouTube videos. Usually dressed in a suit or a surgeon’s gown, he speaks calmly and confidently. In some videos, he’s wielding a fetus-shaped doll to get his point across, and on other occasions, he uses crass humor about promiscuity, possibly to endear him to younger audiences.
Antonios has been the face of the anti-abortion campaign ever since the abortion law was liberalized. According to the Coalition of Comprehensive Abortion Care’s monitoring, he reaches young people through social media influencers, staged debates in schools, and community events. He’s also a prolific media commentator who’s written op-eds, appeared on TV, and started petitions against comprehensive sex education, which he described in 2024 as “sexualization programs that alienate them [students] from their family, cultural, and religious values.”
As with many anti-abortion groups in the United States and around the world, United for Life Ethiopia also opposes LGBTQ+ rights.
Antonios did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Recognizing that part of the success in 2005 came from building political will, Coalition of Comprehensive Abortion Care members have begun holding workshops for parliamentarians and senior officials in Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health. Crucially, they also provide training for journalists to improve how abortion is reported on in local media. And they, too, attempt to reach young people by working with TikTok accounts, such as Yene Tena (“my health”), to dispel common misconceptions, such as the idea that “contraceptives are only for married women” or “abortions make a woman infertile.”
“The main idea is to show the gains from the abortion care services after 20 years,” said Dereje Wondimu, a policy and community mobilization advisor at Ipas Ethiopia, a coalition member organization. “Showing these gains is an effective way to convince people, as well as government officials.”
But countering disinformation is not done without risk. In a deeply religious country, where same-sex relations are illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison, advocates say that speaking out can result in supporters of abortion access being labeled as “homosexuals” threatening to tear apart family values, or even as the devil.
“You will end up being immediately stigmatized if you want to go and teach about abortions,” said Woineshet Tibebu, the executive director of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, one of the key forces behind the 2005 legal reform. “It’s tied to 666,” she added. The number is a biblical reference that has come to denote the Antichrist. According to Tibebu, women’s rights advocates are increasingly being characterized as evil, anti-family, promoting single motherhood, and supporting infanticide.
Tibebu admitted that the risk of public attack has made her organization hesitant to openly defend abortion access. “If you go out and start talking about abortion, then you may not be able to do work the next day,” she said.
Shibru of MSI understands the desire to be cautious. He said that his family is worried for him: “My wife is telling me she’s nervous for my safety. There are many providers who have left the sector because of this pushback.”
In recent times, Ethiopians who have spoken up for women’s rights on a range of issues have reportedly faced “brutal online attacks,” according to reporting from AFP, and even been forced to leave the country.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the current crisis, the Coalition of Comprehensive Abortion Care wants to decriminalize abortion altogether. The group has powerful allies within parliament, and Ethiopia’s minister of health, Mekdes Daba, we’re told, was the chair of the coalition several years before taking up her ministerial role. Daba was the president of one of the coalition’s member organizations, the Ethiopian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
For now, neither Hanna, the nurse, nor the other advocates interviewed said that they will compromise on their stances. But broader public support is necessary if further liberalization of abortion access is to be a reality. Much will depend on which message gets across: abortion as a sin or as a way to save a woman’s life.
This reporting was supported by MSI Reproductive Choices.
