N’Diaye, Marième <br/><br/>
A Controversy Around Legalizing Abortion in Senegal. How to Oppose the “African” Maputo Protocol? 

 -  2025.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The ban on abortion in Senegal makes it one of the main causes of women’s mortality and incarceration. Yet the state has ratified the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (known as the Maputo Protocol), an addition to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, which permits abortion in cases of such as rape and incest. The Senegalese government has therefore opened a debate on the possible liberalization of the anti-abortion law, stressing the public health implications. Although the country’s opposition movement comprises a coalition of actors with plural, and at times conflicting, interests, it is structured around a unifying discourse that combines foreign influences with specifically African characteristics. Playing on their multi-positionality, the members of the countermovement alternate between radical action, threats of recourse to violence, and rhetoric of responsibility to assert themselves in the public debate and prevent any reform.