Inter-Religious Council Submits detailed Position Paper on Safe Motherhood Bill
The IRCSL had submitted a detailed Position Paper on the Safe Motherhood and Reproductive Health Care Bill 2024 to the leadership of Parliament.
In this position paper, the Council stated that: “We intimated you during our meeting held on the 30th of December 2024 in one of the committee rooms in Parliament that our position paper was done in a hurry with not much time to cover all areas of concern. We were then asked to bring forward those other concerns”, said by one Sub-Committee member of the Inter-Religious Council.
Bishop Akintayo Sam-Jolly who is the Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Proposed Health Bill, in his recent letter, drew the attention of Parliament to the Position Papers of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Sierra Leone wherein salient concerns were raised in those documents.
He continued that: “While clustered concerns may be reflected here, many Scriptural and scientific concerns were raised. We wish to draw your attention also to the foreword of the PFSL position paper. Reference was made to the statement of the Minister of Health, Honorable Austin Demby, in the Maternal Death Surveillance
Report 2020 which serves as indictment to the ministry for all this push towards legalizing abortion and passing a law that focuses on addressing what was rated as the seventh factor in the Maternal Mortality Ratio”.
In a recent live interview, the popular clergy said that the Honorable Minister said the MMR should now be 200 per every 100,000 live births. If, according to the NCRA reports averagely 250,000 live births take place in Sierra Leone, it means that about 500 maternal mortality deaths occur, he continued, intimating that, If it still stands that 2.9% deaths are due to abortion, (MDSR 2020) it would mean that 15 deaths occur between spontaneous and induced abortion. If the MMR still stands at 443 (MDSR 2020) per 100,000 live births, it means that 1,107.5 deaths occur per year. If 2.9% is due to abortion, (MDSR 2020) that will be 32 deaths, he maintained, noting that as much as every life is important to God, if MOH keeps on doing what has been reducing the MMR, they will not need to legalize abortion to save lives.
“With the fertility rate in Sierra Leone on a decline, (according to the Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey 2019), we do not need abortion to further cut down on our population. All other source documents are found in the Position Papers”, he added.
