Beth MacLean, who won human rights case for people with disabilities, dies at age 50

HALIFAX — Beth MacLean, a Nova Scotia woman with intellectual disabilities who won a landmark human rights case forcing the province to provide her with a home in the community, has died.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

An obituary says the 50-year-old died peacefully on Sept. 24 at the Dartmouth General Hospital.

MacLean was one of three people with intellectual disabilities who were required to live in a Halifax hospital ward for years before advocates helped them launch a human rights case to live with the help of support workers in a small home in the community — referred to as a small options home.

In 2019, a human rights board of inquiry determined the three had suffered discrimination individually; however, it rejected arguments that placement in small options homes is broadly applicable to people with disabilities.

Small options homes are defined by the province as homes in residential areas for up to four people with disabilities, where they receive care and other necessary support.

The board of inquiry ruling determined the province violated the rights of MacLean, Joseph Delaney and the late Sheila Livingstone — who died before the hearing ended — because they were held at the Emerald Hall psychiatric unit in Halifax despite opinions from doctors and staff that they could live in the community.

Marty Wexler, the chairman of the Disability Rights Coalition in Nova Scotia, said in an email Wednesday he was saddened to hear of MacLean's death and extended the coalition's condolences to her family, support workers and "all who assisted Beth in her fight for her dream of a life in the community with others."

"After decades of struggle and unnecessary institutionalization in which Beth was forced to fight her own government, she achieved her dream of life in the community," he wrote.

"Her human rights case provides an important precedent for the many hundreds of others who are unnecessarily deprived of the opportunity to live in the community. Her experience, one would hope, will push the provincial government to do the right thing and enable others to live in the community and avoid the struggle and hardship that Beth endured to get the life she wanted."

During the hearing, MacLean's lawyers argued that a 1995 provincial moratorium on the creation of small options homes — which the province later lifted — was a conscious decision by governments to restrict access to services.

In his 2019 ruling, however, board chairman Walter Thompson didn't accept that the province generally discriminated against people with disabilities who reside in hospitals, in large institutions, or who are on a waiting list for placement in small options homes.

The coalition appealed the portion of the board of inquiry decision in which Thompson rejected the claim of systemic discrimination. The province has also appealed the findings of discrimination against MacLean, Delaney and Livingstone.

The various parties are awaiting the Court of Appeal decision.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 30, 2021.

Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press

In ‘Nuclear Family,’ filmmaker explores her lesbian moms’ historic lawsuit

Max Gao 

Three decades after she found herself in the middle of a landmark legal battle between a lesbian couple and the gay sperm donor who sued them for paternity and visitation rights, filmmaker Ry Russo-Young has excavated her own family history with the help of old photos, home movies and in-depth interviews in the new HBO docuseries “Nuclear Family.”

© Provided by NBC News

The three-part documentary, which Russo-Young said “is very much my perspective on this story,” re-examines the case that played a crucial role in validating the legal existence of families with same-sex parents. It’s a story that the 39-year-old director — whose other credits include “The Sun Is Also a Star,” “Nobody Walks” and “Before I Fall” — resisted telling at first in the form of a documentary, because she “didn’t want to make a me-and-my-problems doc.”


It wasn’t until she became a mother herself, and felt that she had the necessary tools and skills “to do this story justice,” that she decided it was the right time to revisit her past.

“Becoming a mother, having my own children, made me realize how important a child is in one’s life and how it completely changes your whole world, because the amount of love and concern that you feel for that child is so massive,” Russo-Young told NBC News in a recent phone interview. “I think I understood the stakes of the story for everyone involved in a much deeper way … Eventually, I felt like I needed to tell it for me, and I had to have faith that it would matter to other people, because we could tap into more universal themes of family.”

HBO Cade Russo-Young, Sandy Russo, Ry Russo-Young, and Robin Young in HBO's

The story dates to the late 1970s at a time when sperm banks would not cater to lesbian couples who were looking to start their own families, thereby eliminating the possibility of having an anonymous donor. Instead, Sandy Russo and Robin Young — a lesbian couple living in New York City — were introduced to two gay men living in California who were willing to donate their sperm to help the women start their family.

Young gave birth to Russo-Young in 1981 using sperm donated by one of those men, a prominent civil rights attorney named Tom Steel; Russo had given birth to a daughter named Cade a year earlier using sperm donated by the other man, Jack Cole. Russo and Young said they made their intentions very clear from the outset: Both men would have “no rights, no responsibilities,” as Russo put it in the film, but the women would give the girls a chance to meet their biological fathers at some point.

Steel vacationed occasionally with the family when the girls were growing up. But when those relationships soured, he sued Young in 1991 for visitation rights and to be recognized as Russo-Young’s father, beginning a four-year dispute with a lesbian couple who had no legal protections and, according to Russo-Young, wasn’t recognized as a “legitimate family.”

“I think that biology sort of trumped everything else" at that time, Young said in a recent Television Critics Association panel. “So if a gay man was a donor and in a dispute with a lesbian couple or a single lesbian mother, the law recognized that relationship over any other partnership or nonbiological family member. The whole focus of the law was the nuclear, heterosexual family. That was the norm and that was the desired norm. And anything outside of that could be deemed harmful to the child or not in the child’s best interest.”

© HBO Ry Russo-Young and Tom Steel in HBO's

Using many of the same arguments that discriminated against the LGBTQ community to which he belonged, including the belief that “it’s always in the child’s best interests to have a father” or the child would be seen as illegitimate, Steel lost the initial judgment but won an appeal to the State Supreme Court before ultimately dropping the case altogether. He died of complications from AIDS in 1998, at the age of 48.

While she had a dreamy and idyllic childhood with dress-up and imaginary games, Russo-Young said that those painful years “obliterated any kind of warmth that I had felt before” toward Steel, leading her to publicly deny her connection to him in the immediate aftermath of the lawsuit. In her early 20s, shortly after Steel died, Russo-Young received a box of home videos that chronicled their short time together. “I watched about a minute of those tapes and then put them away for many, many years and didn’t look at them,” she recalled.

But as she began to tell coming-of-age stories about people from different walks of life, she began to confront certain themes that led her to ponder her own upbringing: “How does the way that I was raised and the narrative that I grew up with inform who I am today and how I see the world?” It wasn’t until she was in her mid-30s and thinking about making a film about the lawsuit that she decided to take those same tapes — including one where Steel tried to explain his side of the story before he died — out of the closet again.

In an attempt to wrap her mind around the entire experience and “to reconnect to the feelings of warmth and love that we felt prior to the lawsuit,” Russo-Young decided to speak with Steel’s friends and the son of his partner in an attempt to better understand his side of the story.

“They all felt like Tom was doing what he had to do. There was no remorse,” Russo-Young revealed. “There was still anger, I would say, on everybody’s part towards the ‘other side.’ And that was something that was really striking to me, was how, to this day, everyone was convinced that they were very right. I really see the humanity on both sides, and that’s really compelling to me.”

Ry Russo-Young. (HBO)

Through the process of making this film, Russo-Young said that her perception of Steel had changed — even if her mothers’ minds have not — and she has learned to “embrace the nuance of my own feelings toward the lawsuit, toward my sperm donor, in a way that I can now sort of hold all of the feelings at the same time, as contradictory as they may be.”

“I have a lot of empathy for Tom now,” she said. “And sometimes, when I see him on film or think about him or watch those videos, I have a pang of, ‘Oh, I so wish he was still alive so that I could talk to him now and ask him things about the film and get to know him as a person and have him know me now as an adult.'”

But to maintain a certain level of professional distance, Russo-Young worked collaboratively with two editors, Pisie Hochheim and Ben Gold, to review decades of footage and had to “refer to myself in the third person a lot of the time and talk about Ry as a separate character who had to go on a journey in this movie,” she said.

For Dan Cogan, who served as a producer of “Nuclear Family,” Russo-Young’s strong background in scripted storytelling allowed her to strike a perfect balance between being both the guide and participant. “On the one hand, she was bringing herself and her feelings and her experience, and so the film is incredibly, intimately personal. At the same time, she was able to separate from her emotions and see the narrative as a storyteller,” Cogan said.

“To make something great, to craft a story, you have to both feel those emotions and also be able to step back and see it as a story that you are building,” he added, “and I think Ry’s scripted background helped her understand these real people as characters in a story.”

But in doing so, Russo-Young also had to risk hurting her mothers and her older sister, asking them to relive some of the most anxiety-inducing moments of their lives in excruciating detail. (Russo-Young noted that her mothers tried to protect her and her sister “from as much of the case as they could” when it was happening, but they were still subject to regular appointments with a court-appointed psychiatrist or they risked losing the initial case to Steel.)

In a particularly striking scene in the third episode, Russo-Young sits down with her mothers and tries to reconcile her own memories with what they have always told her — and what they say was ultimately done in her best interest. “Filming that scene was terrifying to me, because I didn’t want to hurt them, and they’d already gone so far with me in terms of participating in the film,” Russo-Young recalled.

She continued: “I told my moms prior to the actual shoot when I was in Los Angeles, preparing my questions: ‘I’m going to ask you some really hard questions. Please know that I love you and that I’m not saying you were bad parents. I don’t want this to be an attack — I don’t want you to feel it that way — but I have to ask these questions for myself. … I know you can do this with me, because I love you and we’re a strong family … and that’s what gives me faith that I can ask you these tough questions.’”

While they might now have different opinions about the lawsuit, Russo-Young and her mothers all agreed that a significant amount of progress has been made to advance LGBTQ rights in the last 40 years, especially with the legalization of same-sex marriage and the normalization and stability of gay families in the United States.

 

 Robin Young and Sandy Russo. (HBO)

“There’s still some distance to go, but the difference between when we were starting out as a family and now, it feels like eons,” Young said.

Russo-Young said she believes some of that progress was undoubtedly due to her mothers.

“Even the press that we did after the lawsuit was helpful to normalizing gay families, because seeing a lesbian family on the 6 o’clock news was just something that didn’t happen,” she said. “I remember hearing that it was the first in the nation where a lesbian family was recognized as an autonomous family. … It felt like such a win because the court was such a biology-based, patriarchal system at the time, so that decision really did feel like a miracle and was a complete rarity at the time. And that’s when I realized that maybe we were making change in some way.”

In a 1993 report in The New York Times, Peter Bienstock, the lawyer representing Russo and Young, said their court victory “recognizes, for the first time, the rights of children who are born to lesbian mothers.”

And while she acknowledges that the world has changed in her lifetime, with gay families going from “this hidden, renegade, DIY thing that barely existed to mainstream societal acceptance,” Russo-Young hopes that her documentary series “will also help propel us to continue forging rights for LGBTQ families.”

“I think we still have far to go, because I don’t think we realize how there are still not protections for gay families in all states,” she said.

The first episode of “Nuclear Family” is streaming on HBO Max. The second and third episodes will air on HBO on Oct. 3 and 10, before arriving on HBO Max.

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Haitian migrants get help from Texas group rallying thousands of donations

Tired, anxious and awaiting a new place to call home, almost 30,000 migrants were found camping or attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas, the Department of Homeland Security reported.

The migrants, many of whom are Haitian, have trekked north through Latin America, through dangerous conditions to escape earthquakes, the worsening effects of climate change, and political unrest. Many were left without basic necessities, so the Texan activist group Black Freedom Factory answered their calls for help.

The group put out calls for money, donations and other resources to help ease the burden for migrants seeking asylum. They collected, delivered and distributed tens of thousands of supplies to migrants in the United States and Mexico.

© Julio Cortez/AP Migrants, many from Haiti, wait to board a bus to Houston at a humanitarian center after they were released from United States Border Patrol upon crossing the Rio Grande and turning themselves in seeking asylum, Sept. 22, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas.

"We collected over 62,000 units in less than 48 hours last week," Kimiya Factory, executive director of Black Freedom Factory, said. "People started to donate items from all over the country because the biggest question was, 'how can we help if we're not in Texas and we're not near the border?' So we wanted to bridge that gap for people in the U.S. who care about immigrants and know what they contribute to our country."

According to DHS, about 17,400 migrants are awaiting their turn to claim asylum in the U.S. Another 2,000 people were loaded onto planes and deported back to Haiti. And 8,000 more returned south to Mexico.MORE: What is Title 42? Amid backlash, Biden administration defends use of Trump-era order to expel migrants

Factory said the initial ask for donations quickly grew from a statewide initiative to a nationwide movement, as people across the country banded together to get these families what they need.

They made an online shopping wishlist and within days, she said that her team was receiving hundreds of boxes a day.

"We're bringing everything from clothes to baby supplies, hygiene products, menstruation items, food, snacks, nonperishable items -- anything you can think of has been donated," Factory said.

© Black Freedom Factory The Black Freedom Factory has collaborated with groups like Black Voters Matter to ensure that Haitian migrants receive care and necessities.

The group is following the trail of where Haitians have been deported to or where they've been sent in the U.S. to help them get settled into their new lives.


Interacting with the migrants has been tough for Factory and her volunteers. They say the migrants are exhausted, and the children are scared about what is next for them -- will they return to a country they don't remember? But Factory said that the donations, the services and the kind gifts from donors makes the faces of migrants light up with joy and relief.MORE: Why thousands of migrants, many from Haiti, are stuck at Texas-Mexico border

"Haitians are arriving with no clothes, no shower, so it's really nice to see where [donors'] resources are going," Factory said. "Their money and their donations are going to the right place."

Viral photos of Haitian migrants being chased, grabbed and thrown around by Border Patrol agents in the ​​Rio Grande highlighted the unrest at the border, and the Biden administration and the DHS faced backlash for its treatment of the migrants.

Border Patrol has temporarily stopped using agents on horseback against migrants. The agents involved in the incidents have been placed on administrative leave pending the results of a DHS investigation.

© Marco Bello/Reuters 

Migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. wait in line to board a bus to Houston from Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition after being released from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in Del Rio, Texas, Sept. 24, 2021.

"It was horrible to see what you saw -- to see people treated like they did -- horses nearly running over people, being strapped," President Joe Biden said in response to a question from ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott about taking responsibility for the Border Patrol's actions. "It's outrageous, I promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences. It's an embarrassment, beyond an embarrassment. It's dangerous. It's wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world, sends the wrong message at home."

Biden was also criticized for deporting thousands of people without offering them the right to request asylum in the U.S.

However, Biden defended this action by invoking Title 42, a part of U.S. public health code that "allows the government to prevent the introduction of individuals during certain public health emergencies," like the coronavirus pandemic.

But Factory says that she and her dedicated team of volunteers did what they felt was necessary to do, when they saw Black lives being threatened at the border.

Black Freedom Factory began as a tool for Factory and other activists in the San Antonio area to address the issues of racial inequality hands on in their very own community.

From gerrymandering, to gentrification, to economic inequality -- the Black Freedom Factory collaborates with other local leaders, including public officials and other grassroots movements helping change the culture.MORE: US special envoy for Haiti resigns in protest over migrant removals

"This further proves the anti-Blackness that is rampant in the United States, and that the pictures that we saw [of] Black migrants being whipped is indicative of the conversation about Black lives mattering," Factory said. "Not just on U.S. soil but internationally, and as a Black community, we will not stand for the triggering and grotesque images that we constantly have to encounter with our people being harmed."

© Julio Cortez/AP A child sleeps on the shoulder of a woman as they prepare to board a bus to San Antonio moments after a group of migrants, many from Haiti, were released from custody upon crossing the Texas-Mexico border, Sept. 22, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas.

Now, the Black Freedom Factory, along with the organizations they parttner with throughout the nation, say they hope that donors and volunteers continue this energy -- as the crisis at the border and the inequality faced by migrants and aslyum seekers continues.

"I hope people do not lose the sense of urgency that they felt when this news broke," Factory said. "I hope that you know we continue to redistribute our wealth and our privileges as American citizens. And I hope that we understand that immigration issues and crises are everybody's issue and crises, and it's our duty to make sure that the democracy functions upon those values."

"This makes you more aware of the privilege that we have as Americans," she added.

SNAKE OIL KICK BACK
Utah's governor highlighted a controversial essential-oil MLM as a way to protect school kids from a COVID-19

insider@insider.com (Áine Cain) 

© Provided by Business Insider Vote Smart listed the Utah governor as receiving over $10,000 from doTerra International in 2020.

 Chad Hurst/Getty Images for Sundance Film Festival and Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Mercedes-Benz

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox expressed gratitude to multi-level marketing company doTerra on Twitter.

doTerra has offered to give 1 million wipes to Utah schools to prevent COVID-19 transmission.

The company received a reprimand from the FTC over promoting its products as COVID-19 cures.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox took to Twitter to thank doTerra, a controversial direct-sales company, for donating its products to prevent COVID-19 transmission in schools. doTerra is a multi-level marketing company that sells essential oil-based products.

In the 2020 election cycle, doTerra International donated $10,200 to Cox, according to non-partisan research firm Vote Smart.

doTerra has described its On Guard wipes as containing ingredients like "Eucalyptus, Wild Orange, Clove, Cinnamon, and Rosemary essential oils," along with 70% ethyl alcohol. In 2020, Federal Trade Commission ordered doTerra to stop promoting its oils as COVID-19 cures.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention generally recommend frequent handwashing, and listed "touching mucous membranes with hands soiled by exhaled respiratory fluids containing virus or from touching inanimate surfaces contaminated with virus" as causing infectious exposure to COVID-19.

"As Gov. Cox mentioned yesterday, we appreciate the willingness of private sector businesses like doTERRA to support our schools," senior advisor of communications Jennifer Napier-Pearce said in a statement sent to Insider.

doTerra did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Before he became governor in 2021, Cox served as the state's lieutenant governor for Gary Herbert starting in 2013. In 2016, Herbert presented at the World Trade Association of Utah, where doTerra was recognized as the International Company of the Year.

Cox's tweet underscores Utah's strong connection to MLMs. In 2016, local station KUTV reported that the state had the most MLMs per capita. MLMs based in Utah include Nu Skin Enterprises, Young Living, USANA Health Sciences, Morinda, Inc., and Younique.

In the world of MLMs, doTerra has attracted controversy since its founding. The direct-sales company first launched in 2008. Founders David Stirling, David Hill, and Emily Wright previously worked as executives at essential oil giant Young Living. Young Living sued doTerra over allegations of corporate espionage. In 2018, a judge ruled that Young Living acted in "bad faith" and ordered it to pay attorney fees amounting to $1.8 million to its competitor, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

But the battle against Young Living doesn't capture the entirety of doTerra's legal history. Insider identified 27 bankruptcy cases naming doTerra as a party. These cases took place between 2008 and 2020, and involved individual doTerra sellers declaring bankruptcy. Financial difficulties or outright ruin are common outcomes for MLM sellers: A 2018 survey from the AARP Foundation finding that 73% of respondents who participated in MLM schemes either lost money or made no money. Of the quarter of respondents who did earn money, 53% made less than $5,000.

doTerra is also an defendant in an ongoing civil case from a Minnesota seller named Ruth Van Horn, who alleged that the company's green tea extracts caused her liver to fail.

The company's philanthropic efforts have also attracted scrutiny. In 2018, the Pacific Standard reported that the company's foundation was accused of pocketing donations intended for the victims of Hurricane Harvey.

#DECRIMINALIZEDRUGS
Afghanistan is the world's opium king. Can the Taliban afford to kill off their 'un-Islamic' cash cow?

When the khaki-colored landscapes of Afghanistan are transformed by a patchwork of pink, white and purple each spring, farmers rejoice. Their cash crop of poppies is ready for harvesting.

© Emmanuel Duparcq/AFP/Getty Images

 An Afghan soldier walks through a field of poppies during an eradication campaign in Kandahar province's Maiwand district in 2005.

By Kara Fox, CNN 6 hrs ago

Opium cultivation has long been a source of income for rural communities across the country, a land besieged by decades of war. But for the United States, those same colorful scenes symbolized the enemy.

"When I see a poppy field, I see it turning into money and then into IEDs [improvised explosive devices], AKs [assault rifles], and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]," said Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.

This narrative contributed to how the United States' war on drugs was fought -- and lost. Over 20 years, the US squandered nearly $9 billion on a counternarcotics policy that -- perversely -- helped to fill the Taliban's pockets and, in some regions, fueled support for the insurgents.

Now in power, and with an interim government in place, the Taliban are navigating how to manage Afghanistan's entrenched drug economy -- the country's biggest cash crop -- as the whole nation teeters on economic collapse.

Just two days after the fall of Kabul, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid pledged "full assurances to the world" that Afghanistan under Taliban rule would not be a narco-state.

"Afghanistan will not be a place of cultivation of narcotics, so the international community should help us and we should have an alternative livelihood" for opium growers.

But how the Taliban will do that remains uncertain.

The opium economy

Afghanistan produced an estimated 85% of the world's opium in 2020, according to the latest United Nations figures. In 2018, the UN estimated that opium economy accounts for up to 11% of Afghanistan's GDP.

But it's unclear how much the Taliban have profited -- and will continue to do so -- from the opium economy, with estimates around these numbers varying widely.

"Clearly drugs are a very important aspect of the Taliban's profits," Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNN.

"But just like with many other insurgent groups, there is often way too much ... mystique afforded to the drug economies. What competent, even moderately competent insurgents and, frankly, criminal groups do, is to simply tax anything in the area, where they have enough influence to be able to enforce the collection of informal taxation," Felbab-Brown said, noting this can range from sheep stocks to meth production.

While it's impossible to pinpoint just how profitable the opium economy is to the Taliban, over the last two decades, estimates have ranged from the tens of millions to low hundreds of millions. Beyond those figures it's really just "fantasy," she said.

At the beginning of the US-led invasion in 2001, British coalition forces were tasked with developing a counternarcotics policy, but around 2004, the US muscled its way in, Felbab-Brown said, pushing for a more aggressive eradication effort. That included aerial crop spraying, a campaign from 2005 to 2008 that infuriated some Afghan communities and damaged relations between Kabul and Washington.

The importance of the opium trade in financing the insurgency was "routinely cited as a primary reason" for the US' increased counternarcotics efforts, according to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) 2018 report. But the data to support that claim was disputed, and American policy flip-flopped throughout administrations and departments during the 20-year war.

Prior to 2004, the US strategy on drugs was viewed as an "uncoordinated effort [that was] ineffective and in need of significant changes," the SIGAR report said.

"Everyone did their own thing, not thinking how it fit in with the larger effort. State was trying to eradicate, USAID was marginally trying to do livelihoods, and DEA was going after bad guys," one senior Department of Defense official was quoted as saying in the report.

In 2004, however, poppy production spiked, leading to some officials calling for a stronger eradication campaign. Robert Charles, the then-assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, testified that spring that there are "no more urgent and fundamental issues than the drug situation, which if left unchecked, will become a cancer that spreads and undermines all we are otherwise achieving in the areas of democracy, stability, anti-terrorism and rule of law."

"Opium is a source of literally billions of dollars to extremist and criminal groups worldwide," Charles said, adding that slashing the opium supply was "central to establishing a secure and stable democracy, as well as winning the global war on terrorism."

The US Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) operating budget in Afghanistan under President George W. Bush's tenure more than quadrupled from $3.7 million in 2004 to $16.8 million in 2005, then reached $40.6 million in 2008, according to figures from a 2012 Congressional Research Service report.

In 2009, however, the late US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke called the US eradication program "the least effective program ever."

That same year, under the Obama administration, the US scaled back poppy eradication attempts. However, they struggled to effectively implement an "alternative livelihoods" approach -- a program that incentivized governors in poppy-free provinces and encouraged farmers to grow other crops, such as saffron.

But in 2017, the US military once again revved up eradication, launching Operation Iron Tempest, a mission that used B-52 bombers, F-22 fighters and other high-precision warplanes to strike a network of drug labs the US claimed was helping to generate around $200 million annually for the Taliban. The mission was unsuccessful, with experts concluding they'd largely targeted empty compounds owned by local traders -- at the cost of numerous civilian casualties.

Ultimately, US policy was dictated by the idea: "Destroy the crop and destroy the insurgency's primary source of funds," according to the SIGAR report. The basis of that claim, however, "was disputed," with "methodological problems with the data on which it was based," it added.

"Drugs have always had a particularly strong political resonance in the United States and has often been seen as sort of the most damaging, lethal, illegal economies," Felbab-Brown said, adding: "Whether that's objectively true is a separate issue."

Meanwhile, US eradication efforts and interdiction raids -- often hitting poor farmers the hardest -- "thrust" local populations into the hands of the Taliban, she said.

Taliban taxation system?

David Mansfield, who has studied the Afghan drug economy for more than 20 years, says that one of the fundamental issues that led to "erroneous statistics" is the idea that the Taliban run a taxation system based on price or value.

The international community widely believes that the Taliban take 10% of the value of drugs, he said. But in practice, he says that's incredibly difficult to administer.

"I don't see a rural insurgency, where people who have issues of literacy ... running a taxation system based on price or value-added tax," he said. But beyond that, he said it doesn't make sense economically.

Mansfield said profit margins on a kilogram of heroin range from $80-120 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) and around $30-$50 for a kilogram of meth. If you start imposing a 10% tax on the final price at the point of export -- around $1,800 a kilogram for heroin in its base form -- considering all other costs, most will have gone out of business, Mansfield explained.

"When people bandy these numbers around and said 10% of gross, they never factored in any of the costs of production or whether this was even economically feasible. And it's not."

The last thing you want to do if you want to earn revenues on commodities is break the value chain, at which point production becomes unprofitable and there is nothing left to tax, Mansfield added. "So these figures don't make sense administratively or economically."



Political poppies

There are few strands of Afghan society that the drugs economy somehow does not touch.

Last year, Afghan farmers grew poppies across approximately 224,000 hectares (the third highest level ever reported in the country), squeezing out the sticky gum from which heroin and other opiates are made from on a land area 37% bigger than in 2019, according to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Poppy cultivation was estimated to provide up to "590,000 full-time equivalent jobs, more than the number of people employed by the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces," in 2017 according to the SIGAR report.

While it remains an important part of the Taliban's funding, Mansfield says that the Taliban are earning far less on drugs than they are on legal goods. He points to recent research conducted in southern Nimruz province, which borders Iran, that found that the Taliban collected an estimated $5.1 million on the drugs industry compared to $40.9 million levied on fuel and transit goods.

Those poppies, and their production, also hold powerful political and cultural capital.

For generations, Afghan farmers have grown opium and cannabis, an economy that long predates the war. Like other mountain nations, which often provide good climates for poppy growth, opium has been used medicinally and culturally in Afghanistan, according to Jonathan Goodhand, professor in conflict and development studies at SOAS, University of London.

But multiple invasions of the country have fueled opium cultivation and production, he said. This began with the Soviet occupation in the 1980s when large flows of financial and military assistance to the regime and the mujahideen -- from the Soviet Union and the US, respectively -- provided the "start-up capital" for commanders to rev up production, processing and trafficking, according to a 2008 paper by Goodhand.

When the Soviet Union dissolved and the Taliban emerged, taking over Kabul in 1996, opium became a "defacto legal commodity," said Goodhand.

But in 2000, the Taliban changed tack, placing a ban on opium production that reduced production by 90% and virtually eradicated the crop in a year, cutting the world's supply by 65%, according to UN estimates.

The then-Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said growing opium was "un-Islamic," warning in July 2000 that anyone planting poppy seeds would be severely punished.

Goodhand and other experts hypothesize that the move was likely used as a bargaining chip to gain international recognition -- and funding. But the ban backfired spectacularly, running the country into an unemployment crisis and damaging support from poppy farmers, once perhaps sympathetic to the Taliban, who were now in debt. The ban on poppy production was lifted in 2001, with the collapse of the group.

Since then, poppy production has skyrocketed, with an estimated all-time high recorded in 2017 at roughly 9,900 tons, according to the UNODC, which estimated that its worth was around $1.4 billion at the time, equating to roughly 7% of the country's GDP.

It's unlikely that the Taliban will take similar drastic action as in 2000 again, experts say, despite the Taliban's pledge after their takeover.

While the announcement might signal a return to the previous Taliban eradication plan -- an attempt perhaps, to curry favor with Western donors -- the Taliban are also likely hoping to keep neighboring Iran and Russia at bay. The two nations, who have been warming to the group over the last few years, both want to eliminate the massive opium production at their borders.

The Taliban have another external factor to weigh: The rise of synthetic opioids. If Afghanistan's heroin exports plunged as they did back in 2001, it's very likely that synthetic opioids, like fentanyl -- largely from China and India -- would quickly flood markets in Europe, Africa and Canada in place of Afghan opium and heroin, potentially pushing out Afghan opium for good.

"The reality is that they also just can't do it, because the economy's tanking," Felbab-Brown said.

An enforced ban could also create potential for violence, she added.

Felbab-Brown said there are around 100,000 to 150,000 Afghan National Security Forces soldiers and police who are now unemployed, and for whom poppy production might provide some source of economic stability.

"Take that away, then you have 150,000 men who were your enemies and who have nothing to eat," she said.

AP Interview: Ethiopia crisis 'stain on our conscience'

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The crisis in Ethiopia is a “stain on our conscience,” the United Nations humanitarian chief said, as children and others starve to death in the Tigray region under what the U.N. has called a de facto government blockade of food, medical supplies and fuel.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

In an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, Martin Griffiths issued one of the most sharply worded criticisms yet of the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade after nearly a year of war. Memories of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, which killed some 1 million people and whose images shocked the world, are vivid in his mind, “and we fervently hope is not happening at present," he said.

“That’s what keeps people awake at night," Griffiths said, "is worrying about whether that’s what is in prospect, and in prospect soon.”

He described a landscape of deprivation inside Tigray, where the malnutrition rate is now over 22% — “roughly the same as we saw in Somalia in 2011 at the start of the Somali famine," which killed more than a quarter-million people.

The war in Ethiopia began last November on the brink of harvest in Tigray, and the U.N. has said at least half of the coming harvest will fail. Witnesses have said Ethiopian and allied forces destroyed or looted food sources.

Meanwhile just 10% of needed humanitarian supplies have been reaching Tigray in recent weeks, Griffiths said.

“So people have been eating roots and flowers and plants instead of a normal steady meal,” he said.

“The lack of food will mean that people will start to die.”

Last week the AP, citing witness accounts and internal documents, reported the first starvation deaths since Ethiopia’s government imposed the blockade on the region of 6 million people in an attempt to keep support from reaching Tigray forces.

But the problem is not hunger alone.

The U.N. humanitarian chief, who recently visited Tigray, cited the lack of medical supplies and noted that vulnerable children and pregnant or lactating mothers are often the first to die of disease. Some 200,000 children throughout the region have missed vaccinations since the war began.

And the lack of fuel — “pretty well down to zero now,” Griffiths said — means the U.N. and other humanitarian groups are finding it all but impossible to reach people throughout Tigray or even to know the true scale of need.

Phone, internet and banking services have also been cut off.

Billene Seyoum, the spokeswoman for Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, did not respond to questions. The government has blamed problems with humanitarian aid delivery on the Tigray forces, who long dominated the national government before Abiy sidelined them. Abiy's government also has alarmed U.N. officials and others by accusing humanitarian workers of supporting the Tigray fighters.

Griffiths called such allegations unacceptable and unfair. He said he has told the government to share any evidence of misconduct by humanitarian workers so the U.N. can investigate, but “so far as I’m aware, we haven’t had such cases put to us.”

Humanitarian workers boarding flights to Tigray are told not to bring items including multivitamins, can openers and medicines, even personal ones. The U.N. humanitarian chief said he too was searched when he visited Tigray, with authorities examining everything in his bag and even questioning why he was carrying earphones.

Ethiopia's crisis has led the U.N., the United States and others to urge the warring sides to stop the fighting and take steps toward peace, but Griffiths warned that “the war doesn’t look as if it’s finishing any time soon.”

On the contrary, in recent weeks it spread into the neighboring Amhara region. Griffiths said the active battle lines are making it challenging to get aid to hundreds of thousands more people.

Ethiopia will see the formation of a new government next week with another five years in office for the prime minister. Griffiths, who said he last spoke with Abiy three or four weeks ago, expressed hope for a change of direction.

“We’d all like to see is with that election inauguration, that we would see new leadership leading Ethiopia away from the abyss that it’s peering into at the moment, that the national dialogue process which he discussed with me in the past, and his deputy discussed with me last week, that needs to happen,” Griffiths said.

“It needs to be coherent, it needs to be inclusive and it needs to be soon.”

___

Anna reported from Nairobi, Kenya.

Cara Anna And Edith M. Lederer, The Associated Press

Japan manga artist Takao Saito, 'Golgo 13' creator, dies aged 84

© Screenshot: TMSアニメ公式チャンネル | Takao Saito Golgo 13 is a popular manga and anime. Above is a still from the 1983 animated film Golgo 13: The Professional. It was the first animated movie based on the original publication.

AFP 

Manga artist Takao Saito, who created the most prolific Japanese comic-book series of all time "Golgo 13", has died aged 84, his publisher said Wednesday.© STR Takao Saito, who wrote and illustrated hit manga series 'Golgo 13', died of pancreatic cancer

"Golgo 13", the tale of a legendary professional hitman, was first printed in 1968 and has been adapted into anime series, video games and two live-action films.

The assassin Golgo, also known Duke Togo, is of unknown nationality and carries out his hits around the world, with current affairs often inspiring its plotlines.

Its 201st edition came out in July this year, breaking the Guinness world record for the most volumes ever published of a single manga series.

Saito, who wrote and illustrated the series, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer, according to Shogakukan, the publisher of the anthology magazine "Big Comic" in which "Golgo 13" is serialised.

"We offer our heartfelt respect to Mr Saito's achievement and offer our deep condolences," Shogakukan said.

"We plan to continue Golgo 13 in cooperation with his staff, in accordance with his wishes," it added.

Saito was born in Japan's western Wakayama prefecture in 1936, and made his manga debut in 1955 with the title "Baron Air".

The success of another of his works called "Typhoon Goro" in 1960 led him to move from Osaka to Tokyo to establish his own production company.

He was also one of the founders of "gekiga", a realistic genre of manga aimed at adults which began in the 1950s.

kh/kaf/jfx

Takao Saito, Creator Of Golgo 13, Dies At 84
Brian Ashcraft 

On Wednesday, the editorial department of Big Comic announced that Takao Saito passed away on September 24 from pancreatic cancer. He was 84.

Golgo 13 is the second-biggest selling manga series of all time, straddling One Piece at number one and Dragon Ball at number three. It debuted in Big Comic in 1968 and has been in serialization ever since, making it the oldest manga in publication.

When Saito was coming up in the late 1950s and early 60s, he and his cohorts took a stand against the term manga, which is commonly used to categorize Golgo 13. The word evoked cartoony cute characters—kid stuff. “Manga” was antithetical to Saito’s style.

© Photo: STR/JIJI PRESS/AFP (Getty Images) 

Takao Saito is the creator of the popular manga Golgo 13.
Pictured is Takao Saito in a 2017 file photo.

“My people hated that name, so we decided to call our work gekiga [literally ‘theatre-images’] to show that it was about drama,” Saito told The Financial Times in 2015. “So, no, from the very beginning I have never been a manga artist. What I produce is drama.”

Gekiga was not aimed at children, but at adults with adult themes and situations. The stories were the gritty, sexy, and violent. The characters were hard-nosed, like the assassin that made Saito famous. The audience was ready, and Golgo 13 was a smash hit at home. Exporting it seem like a no-brainer.

Starting in the 1980s, Golgo 13 was translated into English—something that Saito was initially against, because even though the main character, also known as Duke Togo, was a modern, gun-toting hitman, he was deeply influenced by samurai.

“That is why I was against the idea of introducing Golgo to foreign countries,” Saito told The Financial Times. “Just take as an example the timing of when he actually takes his shot. It evokes iaido [the martial art of drawing one’s sword and mimicking a deadly blow]. It is the same movement and the same shape. I love Japanese samurai stories and that is why, unconsciously, Golgo moves like a samurai. That is why I thought foreigners wouldn’t understand the story.”

 Screenshot: TMSアニメ公式チャンネル | Takao Saito

 Golgo 13 is one of the biggest selling manga in history.

Prior to animated feature, there had been two live-action films, including that starred Sonny Chiba.

According to Big Comic’s editors, when Saito was still alive, he reportedly said, “Even without me, I want Golgo 13 to continue.” Originally, he did everything from the drawing to the writing, but his production company Saito Production was restructured so that his creation could continue after he was gone. Golgo 13 will remain in publication in accordance with Saito’s wishes, with his company and the editors of Big Comic working together on each new installment.

Saito pushed the envelope and transformed the medium. His influence will continue to be felt. May he rest in peace.

STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE

Puerto Rico residents aren't getting monthly child tax credit payments. That could change soon

Carmen Reinicke 

CNBC


The enhanced child tax credit has in just a few months lowered child poverty, slashed hunger rates and given millions of families a boost in saving and spending for essentials.

© Provided by CNBC In this Monday, Sept. 10, 2018, photo, Idalis Fernandez walks to her hotel room provided by FEMA with her son Adrian, 2, at the Baymont Inn in Kissimmee, Fla. Vouchers that paid for hotel rooms for Puerto Rican evacuees end Friday, leaving many to find roofs over their heads.

However, residents of Puerto Rico, who are U.S. citizens, haven't seen any of those benefits.

That's because they are not eligible to get the advance monthly payments, which amount to hundreds of dollars per month for families with children. 

There are many programs for which residents of Puerto Rico do not enjoy the same level of federal benefits due to the island's status as a U.S. territory, according to Laura Esquivel, vice president of federal policy and advocacy for the Hispanic Federation.

This includes the child tax credit, earned income tax credit, and programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

"All of these facts and statistics about how many children are already being lifted out of poverty because their families are getting this advance payment does not apply to Puerto Rico," Esquivel said.

The new child tax credit

The American Rescue Plan earlier this year expanded the existing child tax credit, adding advance monthly payments and increasing the benefit to $3,000 from $2,000 for children aged 6 to 17 with a $600 bonus for kids under the age of 6 for the 2021 tax year.

The first half of the credit is being delivered in monthly direct deposits through December, and the second half will come when families file their 2021 tax returns next year. So far, the IRS and Treasury Department have sent out three monthly payments to millions of American families.

Most families in the U.S. that have children are eligible to receive some money from the credit. The full benefit goes to married couples with up to $150,000 in adjusted gross income and single parent families with up to $112,500.

Even though residents of Puerto Rico were left out of the monthly advance payments, the American Rescue Plan still made improvements to the child tax credit for people in Puerto Rico.

Before the legislation passed, those living in Puerto Rico were only able to claim the credit if they had three or more children. Now, they will get the credit even if they have one child. The full refundability of the credit also applies to Puerto Rico, meaning residents can apply for the benefit even if they have no taxable income.

Those families that are eligible will get the entire credit in one lump sum at tax time by filing a form 1040.

Payments would help Puerto Rican children now

Though residents of Puerto Rico will eventually get the credit, it isn't helping them now amid their own recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. The island is still also recovering from Hurricane Maria, which struck in 2017.

Nearly 57% of Puerto Rican children were living in poverty in 2019, according to the Instituto del Desarrollo de la Juventud, a non-profit organization focused on youth on the island. The level of children in poverty jumped to 65% in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. By comparison, the official child poverty rate in the U.S. increased to about 16% in 2020 from roughly 14% in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"[Advance payments] could meet the needs immediately, as opposed to something that can just wait until tax season to get a lump sum payment," said Carmen Isaura Rodríguez, advocacy director for the Instituto del Desarrollo de la Juventud.

The credit, and advanced monthly payments, would be particularly helpful for children living with single mothers. Of those in poverty in Puerto Rico, some 75% live in a female-headed household, for which the median income is about $8,800 annually.

"There's definitely a need, and we could se a big reduction in the rate of child poverty in Puerto Rico," Rodríguez said.

Part of the reason that Puerto Ricans aren't getting the monthly payments is that the U.S. left it up to local government to implement the program, as many residents don't file federal income taxes to the IRS, Esquivel explained.

But there is a non-filer portal for U.S. residents who don't file tax returns to sign up for the payments. And, residents of other U.S. territories including American Samoa, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Marina Islands are eligible for the advance payments.

There may be further changes to the child tax credit coming that would specifically help residents of Puerto Rico.

The enhanced child tax credit is only for the 2021 tax year, but Democratic lawmakers plan to extend the credit through 2025 in their $3.5 trillion budget. They are also pushing to keep key changes to the enhanced credit, such as the full refundability and advance monthly payments.

So far, Democrats intend to include making the advance payments available to Puerto Rico residents in the coming years. Of course, legislation is still being written and could change. Democrats plan to pass the budget through reconciliation, a fast-track process that would require all party members to vote in agreement.

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Quebec nurses pan government's bonus offer, say real issue is mandatory overtime

MONTREAL — Sandra Gagnon said she received an excited phone call from her mom last week, after Quebec Premier François Legault said he would give full-time nurses a $15,000 bonus to keep them from quitting the public system.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Gagnon, however, was less excited than her mom. The bonus is bittersweet, she said in a recent interview, and it makes her wonder how much her health is worth.

"It's so great, $15,000, but what do you want me to do with it?" Gagnon said. "I won't have the energy and health to spend it."

On Sept. 23, Legault unveiled what he called a "mini revolution" in the health system, announcing $1 billion to seduce nurses to stay in a network that is missing more than 4,000 of them.

Full-time nurses in the public system would receive one-time bonuses of $15,000, as would part-time nurses who switch to full-time work, Legault said. Nurses who have quit the public health-care network and return full time would get $12,000, while full-time nurses in five regions that are hit particularly hard by shortages would get $18,000, the premier said.

Many nurses and other health-care workers were quick to slam the plan on social media, calling Legault's so-called mini revolution a temporary bandage on an issue that requires serious surgical work. The money is welcome, they said, but it doesn't solve the issue of working conditions, particularly the dreaded mandatory overtime that public-sector nurses are subjected to.

Retired nurse Louise Martel says the money is not enough to bring her back into the system, because it only applies to people who return full time.

"You cannot ask a retired person to come back and work full time — it doesn't make any sense," Martel, 58, who retired in August, said in a recent interview. "We are not going to throw ourselves into the mouth of the wolf!"

Martel, from Baie-Comeau, Que., northeast of Quebec City, said when she heard rumours about the government's announcement, she was tempted. She said she had thought about returning once or twice a week, knowing how desperate hospitals are for staff.

But she said when she heard the official announcement — that the bonuses would only apply to full-time nurses — it felt like a joke.

"I worked as a nurse for 37 years, but really it was more than 45 years if you take into account overtime," Martel said.

Another problem with the bonuses is that they are taxable, she said, adding that close to half the promised amount will go right back to the government. "The bonus should be non-taxable — or give us a car that is worth $15,000."

Even with the taxes, Gagnon said she won't refuse the extra cash.

"Christmas is coming, I'm not going to say, 'no, keep your money,' but it doesn't fix the problem and that's what we've been asking for so long," Gagnon said, adding that she usually ends up working close to 60 hours per week at her Montreal-area hospital because of mandatory overtime.

Gagnon, who has worked as a nurse for 25 years, said it's virtually impossible to refuse overtime, adding that the government should have made solving that issue its priority.

"Nurses should have time to treat patients like if they were their parents, but we can't do it anymore," Gagnon said. "Why didn't the government ask us what we needed? What we are missing?

"There are nurses who know when their shifts start but can never be sure when they are ending," Gagnon said. "It's not rare that I operate for 16 or 17 hours with less than 30 minutes to eat."

Quebec's plan proposes to reduce mandatory overtime, but not eliminate it. Legault said the financial incentives were only one part of the plan, adding that the money is crucial to prevent more nurses from quitting or moving to the private sector.

"Money won't fix all the problems, but we think it will help us to curb the staff shortage in the short term,'' Legault said in a statement. "We have a duty to succeed with everything you do for us. We owe you that.''

Meanwhile, while nurses were getting more money, other health-care workers said they felt left out.

Shortly after learning of Legault's offer to nurses, a major union representing health-care workers such as medical technicians, said it halted the voting process on the government's latest contract offer.

Union interim president Robert Comeau said the premier's announcement angered his members, because they were allegedly told by the government in June there was no money left for the public sector.

"Everything has changed," Comeau said in a recent interview, adding the members he represents also work in sectors facing labour shortages. His member work "in the same rooms" as nurses receiving up to $18,000 in bonuses, he said.

Peter Gleeson, a medical imaging technologist in Montreal, said he and his colleagues are the "eyes of the hospital" and deserve the same level of respect as nurses. Gleeson said he feels like there's a lack of understanding among the public about how intertwined hospital workers are.

"There is hardly a diagnosis made without medical imaging of some sort," Gleeson said in a recent interview, adding that the offer to the nurses has made him feel "invisible."

"There's a variety of needs and realities in the health-care network profession," Gleeson said. "It can be a beautiful and gratifying profession, working as a team, but there’s a lot of frustration that comes with it too."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Sept. 29, 2021.

— With files from Lia Lévesque.

Virginie Ann, The Canadian Press

TEMPLATE FOR TEXAS

Abortion stigma a possible death sentence for Kenyan women

Issued on: 01/10/2021 

Cultural and religious beliefs have created a stigma so strong that even women who procure safe abortions believe they have committed a sin by doing so 

Tony KARUMBA AFP
5 min
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Nairobi (AFP)

Victoria Atieno was waiting at a Nairobi bus stop when she felt blood gush from her body, the result of a secret, self-induced abortion -- a method used by thousands of Kenyan women, with potentially fatal consequences.

Kenya's constitution eased access to abortions in 2010 but entrenched stigma about the procedure means that many women resort to traditional practices or backstreet clinics which put their life in jeopardy.

Even a reproductive health counsellor like Atieno -- her mind blanketed with fear -- ended up gulping down a herbal concoction to induce an abortion in secret.

Hours later, as she experienced a public and hugely traumatic termination, she faced a flood of abuse from onlookers, living out the very nightmare she had tried to avoid.

"People will condemn you, criminalise you, try to chase you out of the community," the 35-year-old mother-of-three told AFP.

Every week, 23 women die from botched abortions, according to a 2012 study by Kenya's health ministry 

Tony KARUMBA AFP

Many women will do anything to avoid that fate, from drinking bleach to using knitting needles or clothes hangers to end their pregnancies.

The results are horrific, ranging from ruptured uteruses, cervical tears and vaginal cuts to severe infections, bleeding and death.

Every week, 23 women die from botched abortions, according to a study by Kenya's health ministry in 2012 - the most recent available government data.

Campaigners say the real number is even higher.

A report released last year by the non-profit Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) estimates that seven women and girls die every day in Kenya due to unsafe abortions.

In the Dandora slum in the eastern suburbs of Nairobi, where Atieno works with the Coalition of Grassroots Women Initiative, sanitation workers sometimes find abandoned foetuses in the neighbourhood's huge garbage dump.

When the health ministry stopped training abortion providers in 2013, access to such services took a hit 

Tony KARUMBA AFP

Volunteers tasked with cleaning up the Nairobi River in 2019 retrieved 14 bodies from its trash-clogged waters, most of them babies.

Cultural and religious beliefs in the deeply Christian country have contributed towards creating a stigma so strong that even women who procure safe abortions believe they have committed a sin by doing so.

More than a year after Susan aborted a pregnancy resulting from a gang rape, the churchgoing mother-of-four still battles intense guilt.

"People see you as a murderer... it makes me feel like I did something very bad," the 36-year-old told AFP.

- De facto ban -

Kenya's constitution says abortions are illegal unless "in the opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law".

No other conditions or terms are spelt out.

The vaguely-worded document puts decision-making power wholly in the hands of health providers.

T

The health ministry was pulled up by the Nairobi high court in 2019 for violating women's and girls' right to physical and mental health 

Tony KARUMBA AFP

So when the health ministry stopped training abortion providers in 2013, access to such services took a hit, and women bore the brunt.

The ministry's move came a year after its own study warned that a "disproportionately high" number of women were dying in Kenya because of unsafe abortions.

"The ministry's decision was not based on scientific evidence, it was made against that evidence, evidence which was gathered by the ministry itself," Martin Onyango, CRR's senior legal adviser for Africa, told AFP.

Ministry officials declined interview requests, with a reproductive health expert in the ministry telling AFP: "We are not permitted to talk about abortion at all. That's the policy."

The ministry was pulled up by the Nairobi high court in 2019 for violating women's and girls' right to physical and mental health by halting training for legal abortion providers.

Yet little has changed on the ground since then, leaving the field open for unscrupulous backstreet clinics to exploit women's need for secrecy.

Ken Ojili Mele's niece died at 26 after a botched abortion.

Long opposed to abortion, the 48-year-old carpenter told AFP he was filled with regret after her untimely death en route to a hospital.

"Maybe she didn't want to tell me because she knew I would have been angry," he said.

"I wish she had shared it with me, I could have maybe helped her find a safer hospital."

- Silence and tears -

Abortions are extremely difficult to access at state hospitals. Some private health providers perform the procedure, for which the fee starts at around 3,000-4,000 Kenyan shillings ($27 / 23.5 euros). Pills are used to curtail shorter-term pregnancies.

For women who turn to these sources, fear of disapproval and shame can run deep. The silence lingers even in doctors' waiting rooms.

"In Kenya, it's not easy to say you want an abortion," said Samson Otiago, a doctor specialising in reproductive health.

Dozens of women visit his Nairobi clinic every month and most have to be coaxed into telling him about their intention to terminate a pregnancy.

Dozens of women visit Samson Otiago's Nairobi clinic every month and most have to be coaxed into telling him about their intention to terminate a pregnancy 

Tony KARUMBA AFP

Some start crying before they have even said a word, he told AFP.

Many can't afford to pay his fees, which start at 4,000 shillings ($36), so occasionally he offers his services for free or on credit.

"Once a woman has decided to do an abortion, she will do it whichever way she can.

"So we would rather do it (for less money) than expose her to quacks and see her again with complications," he said.

In Dandora, as rape survivor Seline awaited the results of a pregnancy test, she had little doubt about what to do next.

Barely surviving on a monthly wage of 5,000 shillings, the 38-year-old domestic worker told AFP she was determined to get an abortion if the test was positive.

"If the hospital refuses, I will do it the traditional way, with herbs," she said, her voice barely rising above a whisper.

"I am ready to do anything, as long as I don't have to have this baby."

© 2021 AFP