Eunice Brookman-Amissah
Eunice Brookman-Amssiah is a Ghanaian former Minister of Health[1] and also served as an Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Netherlands[2] under the Rawlings government. She was the first female vice-president of the Ghana Medical Association.[3]
Brookman-Amissah is also a physician whose leadership has been instrumental in advancing safe abortion access across Africa.[4]
Her efforts have successfully united healthcare providers, government officials, lawyers and activists in support of abortion law reforms in several African countries including Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Benin, Eswatini and Kenya.[4]
In 2023, Brookman-Amssiah was named as one of three Right Livelihood Award laureates for her work on liberalising abortion laws and promoting access to safe abortions in Africa.[5][6]
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edit- That was a totally unacceptable state of affairs,” she said, “given the fact that nobody, absolutely no woman has to die from a totally treatable and manageable cause.”
- Abortion is the only medical condition that is in the Criminal Code, punishable as an offense. And so that tends to influence your thoughts and beliefs about this.”
- I had a patient, at age 14, she walked into my surgery and said the man in the house had asked her to come for an abortion. I said, we don’t do that in this clinic. Monday, we didn’t see her. Tuesday, we didn’t see her on Wednesday.
There was a lot of commotion and now I was told by my nurses that she had been taken to court, because she really didn’t know what was happening. Over the weekend, they had messed up a botched abortion. Unfortunately, she died. I asked myself, what was my contribution to her death and why that was so.”
- Even though there has been so much that’s been achieved, a lot more needs to be done. Women are still dying, and it’s all unnecessary. Women have a right to healthcare. We have the knowledge, we have the instruments, we have everything to stop women from dying.
- Therefore, more work needs to be done to get women the services that will prevent them from dying. And we need to increase access to contraception or family planning because unsafe abortions arise out of unwanted pregnancies,