Western ‘family values’ rhetoric undermines ubuntu and reproductive justice for all in Africa

This op-ed was originally published by Daily Maverick on 16 December 2025.

This article was co-authored by Sesona Buyeye, Communications Coordinator and Duduetsang Mmeti, Associate Communications Director at Ibis Reproductive Health.

As we commemorate Human Rights Day on 10 December, this article looks at how Western-influenced right-wing movements are gaining traction in Africa and are using so-called “traditional family values” to undermine sexual and reproductive health rights and LGBTQIA+ rights.

Across the world, rightwing movements — often cloaked in the language of “moral and religious preservation” and “anti-wokeness” — are pushing back against progressive human rights advancing reproductive freedoms for women, girls and queer people.

Alarmingly, these movements are also gaining traction across parts of Africa, where significant strides have been made in embracing democracy, advancing constitutionalism, and advocating for non-racialism and reproductive freedoms in the post-colonial era. Hard-won successes of progressive reproductive rights, including the promulgation of legal instruments such as the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (better known as the Maputo Protocol), are aimed at combating discrimination and violence against women and advancing reproductive rights for women and girls in Africa. At least 44 out of 55 African Union Member States have ratified the Maputo Protocol as of June 2023, and this has ensured that women and girls in most countries are guaranteed access to abortion and family planning services.

In May 2025, feminist and reproductive justice organisations expressed their outrage when rightwing lobbyists from Europe and the United States of America held the Second Pan-African Conference on Family Values (PACFV) in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference was convened to pass blame on abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights as the reason for a decline in Christian values and morality. Another conference, planned for 2027, will be hosted in South Africa.

One of the arguments raised at the conference was the likening of abortion and family planning to violence attributed to civil wars and post-election conflict. Conservative groups in attendance unconscientiously argued that much like war, abortion access and family planning threatened human life and women’s fertility. But this could be further from the truth. In fact, one could argue that restricted access to abortion and family planning could amount to reproductive violence. For instance, in the aftermath of the war in South Sudan in 2013, harsh restrictions on abortion and family planning were weaponized to force women into reproduction as a means of replacing the population lost after the war. This practice, often understood as “reproductive coercion” reduced women’s agency to bearing children and denied them the right to choose when and how many children to have. With little to no access to safe abortion care during that time, many women who did not want to continue their pregnancies resorted to seeking unsafe, and often life-threatening abortions.

Research from the Centre for Reproductive Rights indicates that restrictive laws on abortion access do not reduce abortions, and that in fact, such restrictions increase unsafe abortion, as was the case in South Sudan. The research also asserts that abortion when performed in line with the WHO guidelines is not harmful to women’s fertility, and neither is family planning. In fact, the WHO guidelines recommend post-abortion family planning care to prevent unwanted pregnancies and empower women to exercise bodily autonomy.

Read the full article here.