Benin's first female vice-president on women's bodies, Amazon warriors and being called a feminist

Benin’s first female vice-president on women’s bodies, Amazon warriors and being called a feminist

For Mariam Chabi Talata, legalising abortion and educating girls are essential first steps in giving women control of their future


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Vice-President Mariam Chabi Talata and President Patrice Talon are inaugurated in May last year. Photograph: Yanick Folly/AFP/Getty


Years ago, Mariam Chabi Talata says, she knew a girl who got in some trouble. The girl thought she could not tell her parents, and she could not go to hospital, because the solution to her problem was then a crime. So the girl sought help from an “angel-maker”.
The backstreet abortionist nearly made an angel of the girl, who ended up in hospital, sick with complications from the procedure. Because what she had done was illegal, the girl, who was young and scared, said her mother had given her some herbal tea. And there they were: the girl, who could have died, and her mother facing a potential prison sentence. Talata, who heard about it through community chatter and isn’t-that-a-shame gossip, was thinking about that girl years later when, as vice-president of Benin, her country legalised abortion. “It’s about saving lives,” she says. “This is a public health issue. We can’t ignore it. Abortion was there. It is a reality. How do we keep it from becoming a real public health issue? That’s what the question is about. “Some say that abortion is a crime, but when the law does not allow abortion, it is a double crime, sometimes even a triple crime,” she says.

Talata, 58, is Benin’s first female vice-president. The former teacher and school inspector is one of a small but growing number of women reaching higher office across sub-Saharan Africa – and often bringing more feminist policies with them. She was appointed in 2021 when Patrice Talon, a wealthy cotton magnate, was re-elected for a second term as president. But her country has a rich history of empowered legendary women, she says, pointing to Benin’s origins as the kingdom of Dahomey, with its all-female regiment of Amazons – “an army essentially made up of women who went to fight”.

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Still from Black Panther movie showing all-female Dora Milaje warriors
The Dahomey Amazons are said to be the inspiration for the all-female Dora Milaje regiment in the movie Black Panther. Photograph: Matt Kennedy/AP

Today, the maternal mortality rate in Benin, a west African country of 12 million people on the Gulf of Guinea sandwiched between Togo and Nigeria, is high – nearly 400 women die for every 100,000 live births. A woman’s lifetime risk of dying during pregnancy or in childbirth is one in 49. By comparison, the risk for a woman in the UK is one in 8,400. According to Benin’s minister of health, roughly 20% of maternal deaths are the result of unsafe illegal abortions. Whatever your opinion on abortion, safe and legal procedures are necessary to prevent girls and women from dying after unsafe and illegal ones, Talata says.

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But Talata, a mother of four, is using her term in office not just to push for change in women’s health but, more importantly, she says, in education. Educating girls, she says, remains Benin’s greatest challenge – and resource. “An educated woman is able to defend herself,” she says. “An educated woman is able to take charge of her life. An educated woman is able to participate in the management of her country.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/mar/15/mariam-chabi-talata-benin-first-female-vice-president-on-abortion-rights