MANDO, Ghana: Students stand in front of a chalkboard where a diagram has been drawn showing how to use a female condom. At the local Methodist high school in Mando, a sexual health club meets weekly, and students are grilled on how to use a condom, the difference between short-acting contraceptives like pills and long-acting ones like IUDs, and why abstinence is the only 100 percent way to prevent pregnancy.
The past decade has brought significant progress in making abortion safer and more accessible across Ghana, coming hand in hand with a marked uptick in contraception use and easier access to family planning measures than ever before. Abortion remains stigmatized, taboo, and often clandestine, but in big cities, if not quite yet in the country’s more rural reaches, it is slowly being talked about more openly, and women are better able to get safe procedures. But that progress may have just hit a wall, in the form of an American president bowing to domestic anti-abortion forces and implementing restrictive policies that will cut off U.S. aid to any foreign organization that so much as talks about abortion. This new policy, an executive memorandum known alternately as the Global Gag Rule or the Mexico City Policy and signed by President Donald Trump on his fourth day in office, yanks any foreign aid whatsoever -- including money that pays for contraception, safe pregnancy and delivery, childhood vaccinations, and treatment of HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, or other infectious diseases -- from organizations abroad that offer abortions with their own non-U.S. money, refer their clients for safe, legal abortions, or advocate for abortion rights in their own countries. (Photo by Nichole Sobecki)
