Contributed By Media Health and Rights Initiative Team Abuja, Nigeria
When Obunime, popularly called Nime, died two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, silence fell on her home in a way that no one had prepared for. Before that moment, there had been rules. There had been expectations. In the days leading to her death, there had been fear of shame and whispers. The fear of “what will people say?”
After her death, none of that mattered anymore. Her parents no longer cared if people thought she was wayward. As members of her family wept, no one cared whether she had gotten pregnant or how it happened. Those questions, once heavy with judgment, now felt suddenly small, and even cruel in the face of the loss. The only thing that remained was grief.
Her mother wept and said, over and over again, that she wished Nime had told her. “Had I known, Nime won’t have died. Shebi she would have just told me”. She wished her daughter had come to her before taking that mixture, whatever was in it, that led to the infection that slowly took her life.
The worst part? At some point, there was hope. When Nime first started crying badly at night, complaining of intense stomach aches, her father rushed her to the hospital. Some doctors worked tirelessly to save her.
The tests were run. Her parents wondered if it was a burst appendix, intense period pain, or the work of their enemies, after all, it is a wicked world we live in.
The doctors found sepsis and moved for surgery. Her parents were informed that she had recently miscarried a pregnancy, and the sepsis was most likely from an unsafe abortion. Alarm and judgment were postponed as her parents begged for her life to be saved.
“When she gets better, we can ask her what happened”.
The surgeons performed a hysterectomy. At 16. Her father cried into his hands. Not because he thought she would die, at least not at that time, but because he believed the worst thing had already happened. His young daughter had lost her womb before she had even lived.
That was his worst fear at the time. He didn’t know that four days later, it would become something worse. The infection had already spread. Sepsis had taken hold. Then Nime died, and all her parents had left were shock and grief. “I don’t even understand how we got here.”
The community was abuzz with different talks and views. When a neighbour asked, “Why did she even get pregnant?” something broke in Nime’s father. He lunged at the neighbour until people had to pull him away physically. In the middle of it all, her mother cried out a question that should haunt all of us, “So because my daughter got pregnant now, her punishment should be death?”
Nime is a mirror for countless girls and women. It is easy to say that statistics have shown that over 20,000 people die from unsafe abortions every year in Nigeria, with a significant proportion being adolescents and young women under 19 . It is easy to read this from a journal. Numbers have a way of creating distance. They make things sound clinical, contained, almost manageable. But behind every number is a life like Nime’s. A life that has been interrupted, misunderstood, and, too often, judged even in death.
To put this into perspective, when a plane crashes, and 200 people die, it becomes a national tragedy that dominates headlines, sparks investigations, and leads to demands for accountability.
But what about over 20,000 deaths from unsafe abortions each year? That is the equivalent of more than 100 plane crashes. Yet, we bury this in reports, percentages, and biased headlines. Statistics alone would never tell the full story, stories of fear and stigma that keep girls silent, the shame that makes even married women hide, the restrictive laws that lead to desperation and eventual unsafe options. The reports never show the stories of the families and loved ones left behind.
Across Nigeria, young women and girls navigate a system that often fails them at every level. We are told to abstain but not given comprehensive sexuality education or protection against sexual abuse. We are warned about consequences more than our male counterparts but are not equipped with tools for prevention. Our society, especially the African one, expects us to be silent, but still punishes us when that silence leads to a crisis.
Unsafe abortion does not happen in isolation. Research by Media Health and Rights Initiative of Nigeria MHR has shown that it exists at the intersection of stigma, restrictive policies, poverty, gender inequality, and lack of access to youth-friendly health services. For many girls, especially those under 19, the barriers are even higher.
The question is not really whether Nime and girls like her should have made other choices. It is about whether we, as a society, believe that young women deserve to live, even when they make choices we do not agree with.
The answer to this question will determine whether we continue to count the number of deaths or start saving lives.
