Unsafe Abortion in Tanzania

Current abortion law is restrictive, but its legal interpretation needs to be clarified. In Tanzania, the penal code explicitly states that termination of pregnancy is legally permitted if it is performed to save a woman’s life.1 However, a recent report indicated that since Tanzania’s legal system is based on English common law, the English case of Rex v. Bourne could be applied in the interpretation of Tanzania’s abortion law to authorize abortion to preserve a woman’s physical or mental health.2 Furthermore, in 2007, Tanzania ratified the African Charter’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (also referred to as the Maputo Protocol), which requires the government to “protect the reproductive rights of women by authorising medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, [and] incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the [pregnant woman] or the life of the [pregnant woman] or the foetus.”3(p. 16) Yet despite ratification, the Tanzanian government has not incorporated this provision into its national laws.