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A Doctor Arrested and Placed in Police Custody in Morocco after an Abortion Attempt on a Minor

A Moroccan doctor and his assistant were arrested on Thursday, April 27, 2023, in the act of attempting an abortion on a 15-year-old minor, a practice that is still illegal in Morocco.

A Moroccan doctor and his assistant were arrested on Thursday 27 in the act of attempting an abortion on a 15-year-old minor, an illegal practice in Morocco, AFP learned from a police source. The arrest took place in a private clinic in Meknes (north of the country) by agents of the anti-gang brigade of the local police headquarters, according to the same source.

โ€œWhen will this masquerade end?”

The doctor and his assistant, aged 71 and 64 respectively, were taken into custody, she said. The teenager and her mother, as well as a woman from their entourage who accompanied them, were made available to the judicial investigation, added the police source, without further details.

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โ€œA 15-year-old girl trying to end a pregnancy in decent sanitary conditions [โ€ฆ] When will this masquerade end?”, protested on Facebook the feminist collective โ€œHors-la-Loiโ€, which campaigns for the decriminalization of abortion and the protection of individual freedoms in Morocco. โ€œWhat do they want, the 15-year-old girl to keep the child? Or that his mother takes him to see a charlatan? Or that she ends up killing herself?”, denounced on Twitter Narjis Benazzou, an activist of the collective.

A sentence of six months to two years in prison

In the kingdom, a woman who aborts is liable to six months to two years in prison, and people who have performed an abortion from one to five years in prison. The only exception: in case of danger to the health of the mother. Some 600 to 800 clandestine abortions are practiced every day in Morocco, according to associations that campaign for its legalization.

In 2015, the country embarked on a vast debate on the “urgency” of relaxing its legislation in the face of the scourge of clandestine abortions, performed in sometimes disastrous sanitary conditions. An official commission had in the process recommended that abortion become authorized in “certain cases of force majeure”, in particular in the event of rape or serious malformations of the fetus. But no law has since come to endorse these recommendations ardently supported by women’s rights activists.

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