Nigeria’s Proposed Abortion Law: A Step Backward in a Public Health Crisis

In a country where an estimated 1.25 million unsafe abortions occur annually, Nigeria’s Senate is considering legislation that would make a dire situation catastrophic. The Criminal Code Amendment Bill 2025, which recently came before the Senate for concurrence, proposes a ten-year jail term for anyone supplying drugs or instruments to procure abortions. This represents more than a threefold increase from the current three-year penalty. But as confusion erupted among lawmakers over the bill’s vague language during Tuesday’s plenary session, a more fundamental question emerged: are we criminalizing healthcare itself?

Senate President Godswill Akpabio suspended consideration of the bill and referred it to the Committee on Judiciary and Legal Matters after senators couldn’t agree on what constitutes an “unlawful abortion.” When lawmakers themselves cannot determine the boundary between criminal acts and medical care, how can doctors be expected to navigate these waters while a patient hemorrhages before them?

Here’s what many Nigerians don’t know: abortion is not entirely prohibited in Nigeria; it’s restricted. Under current law, abortion is permitted to save the woman’s life, and under the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act, in cases of rape or incest. Post-abortion care is also legal, meaning doctors can treat complications from abortions without legal consequences.

Yet these exceptions barely exist in practice. The life-saving provision is so poorly defined that medical professionals routinely refuse care out of fear of prosecution. Senator Abdul Ningi of Bauchi Central captured this reality when he warned that the amendment “could discourage doctors from providing medical advice to patients with complications or good-faith reasons for seeking abortions.” A woman with an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that is fatal if untreated and where the fetus cannot survive, may still struggle to access timely care. 

Southern Nigeria operates under the Criminal Code Act, while the North follows the Penal Code, but both frameworks already threaten providers with up to 14 years imprisonment. Women seeking abortions also face penalties. Now, the House of Representatives wants to escalate punishment for supplying abortion drugs or instruments, from three years to ten years, with no option of a fine. The bill, presented by Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele alongside amendments to the Federal Road Safety Corps and the Dietician Council of Nigeria, is ostensibly meant to “align with the country’s current economic realities.” But what economic reality is addressed by imprisoning someone for a decade?

Senator Saliu Mustapha of Kwara Central pointed out the obvious: “abortion might sometimes be recommended on health or religious grounds, adding that such cases should not automatically be considered criminal.” He urged a thorough review before passage. It’s telling that even proponents of stricter laws acknowledge the medical necessity of abortion, yet the bill makes no effort to protect those acting on that necessity.

The statistics are not abstract. Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, and unsafe abortion is a leading contributor. According to the Guttmacher Institute and health experts, thousands of Nigerian women seek abortions every year, driven by unintended pregnancies, economic hardship, or health complications. Thousands die annually from complications that would be entirely preventable with access to safe, legal procedures. Thousands more suffer permanent injuries like perforated uteruses.

A woman discovers an unwanted pregnancy. Maybe she’s 15 and still in school. Maybe she’s 35 with four children and can’t afford another mouth to feed, the economic hardship that drives so many of these decisions is crushing. Maybe her pregnancy is the result of rape. Maybe her fetus has a fatal abnormality. Maybe carrying to term would exacerbate her hypertension or diabetes to dangerous levels.

She seeks help and finds doors closed. The respectable clinic cannot help her, it’s illegal. The pharmacist cannot sell her misoprostol, ten years in prison. So she finds someone who can: the backroom chemist with unsterilized instruments, the herbalist with dangerous concoctions, or she attempts it herself. Then come the complications. By the time she reaches a hospital for post-abortion care (which, remember, is legal), the damage is often irreversible.

The irony is that women with money still get safe abortions. They travel to private clinics that operate discreetly, or they fly abroad. It’s poor women without resources who end up bleeding out in their homes or in understaffed public hospitals. The proposed bill would further entrench this inequality. 

The World Health Organization is unequivocal: access to safe abortion is essential healthcare. Like treatment for malaria or cesarean sections, abortion access saves lives. And under the proposed bill’s language, would a pharmacist providing medication for an ectopic pregnancy face ten years in prison? The proposed escalation from will exponentially intensify this fear. A pharmacist who might risk three years for a woman they know is desperate will think twice about ten. A medical supplier will stop stocking certain instruments altogether rather than navigate unclear legal waters. A doctor will let a patient deteriorate longer before acting, just to be certain they can prove the abortion was “lawful.”

There’s also a persistent myth that legal abortion would lead to reckless behavior, women getting pregnant continuously because they can simply abort it. This fundamentally misunderstands both human nature and medical reality. Abortion, even when safe and legal, is not pleasant. It’s not something women choose casually. Access to safe abortion doesn’t increase abortion rates; it decreases deaths from unsafe procedures. What actually reduces abortion rates is comprehensive sex education and accessible contraception, neither of which are adequately available in Nigeria.

The Senate’s decision to suspend consideration and refer the bill to committee, with a two-week deadline for review, is an opportunity, perhaps the last one before this legislation does irreparable harm. The committee must grapple with fundamental questions: What exactly constitutes an unlawful abortion? How do we protect doctors, pharmacists, and medical suppliers providing emergency care or essential medications? How do we enforce the existing exceptions for rape, incest, and life-threatening situations if everyone in the supply chain is too afraid to act?

But the real conversation Nigeria needs goes deeper. It requires acknowledging that criminalizing abortion kills women. It means understanding that a pro-life policy that ignores maternal mortality is contradictory at its core. It demands that we stop treating women’s healthcare as a moral referendum and start treating it as what it is: medicine.

The committee has two weeks to clarify what senators themselves found confusing. Two weeks to decide whether Nigeria will protect the supply chain that makes safe medical care possible, or whether it will criminalize it so severely that the entire system shuts down in fear. The question before the Senate is ultimately simple: Will we create a healthcare system that protects all lives, including the women already here? Or will we keep enforcing laws that don’t stop the act itself, but end up harming the people who turn to it?