Kenyan nurse sentenced to hang for botched illegal abortion in which patient died

The death of a woman who sought an abortion and the death sentence of the nurse who performed the procedure have reignited the debate over abortion rights in Kenya.

A judge sentenced Jackson Namunya Tali, 41, to be hanged after ruling that the nurse was responsible for the death of Christine Atieno, a teenage mother.

Atieno came to Tali on deciding to terminate her second pregnancy. She may have sought the procedure elsewhere and been turned down. According to an account by Tali's wife published in Kenya's Daily Nation, the young woman arrived at Tali's office already in pain.

Abortion rights in Kenya are extremely limited, the procedure is allowed only “for emergency treatment” or when the woman’s life is in danger, Mother Jones reported. This doesn’t seem to have any effect on the number of abortions performed: A 2013 study [pdf] found that there are 48 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 49 in 2012. (In the United States, there were 17 abortions per every 1,000 women in 2011.) Virtually all of the 465,000 abortions performed in Kenya in 2012 were clandestine and therefore unsafe, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Previous legislation mandated that three doctors were needed to approve an abortion and the procedure could only be performed if a woman’s life was in danger. Kenya's constitution, adopted in 2010, only requires that one doctor approve an abortion.