Pricilla Mukokobi
Conservative and religious organisations yesterday called on government not to allow same-sex marriage as it is “an abomination”, and also pontificated against abortion and surrogacy.
Sasha Louw is the founder of Conserve Namibia, a religious organisation which encourages people not to abort children, and said it is in the best interest of the nation that the right to a family for same-sex partners will never become a law in Namibia. Another organisation named the Christian Coalition of Churches in Namibia strongly advocated for a law to be enacted that explicitly prohibits the practices of homosexuality (which includes same-sex marriages) in Namibia. This Act should further prohibit any funding that promotes such practices in the country. Such a law would, therefore, put to rest the matter and articulate the values and morals of the people of Namibia.
“Every child born is born with the natural right to its own mother and father. In the cases of surrogacy, there can be up to two parties which the child will be removed from, being its biological parent (the egg or sperm donor), and then the surrogate mother who has carried the child for nine months in her body. This type of set-up has negative effects on the child,” Louw stressed.
She said at birth, the mother is the crucial parent in the picture. Her voice and her smell are known to the infant, and offer a sense of security and wellbeing that matter on emotional, psychological and physiological levels. Breastfeeding is extremely beneficial to both mother and child in the same way. Remove a child from its mother immediately after birth, and one will find consequences of that not only now, but later in life. That is straight-up science when you remove the homosexual element from the picture. But if two gay people want a child, suddenly what society all instinctively knows to be true, becomes skewed. That is not in the best interest of the child, Louw noted.
She added that by nature, both genders bring a balance into the child’s life that is necessary and is best for its development. This fact is quite obvious to a child psychologist or anyone who has studied child development and wellbeing, and comes totally natural to a man or woman when they become a parent.
“Namibia, we can do better than that. There are so many fantastic organisations in this country who come alongside mothers to empower them to keep their children. Let us support these organisations, and invest our resources and our energies into additional structures that can actually uplift our nation. If the reason someone wants to abort is poverty, then let us address poverty. Poverty is the problem, not the child,” she continued.
Conservatives and religious groups have been buoyed by a recent Supreme Court ruling that denied citizenship to a child born through surrogacy to a Namibian same-sex couple in South Africa.
A full bench of Supreme Court judges agreed that Phillip Luhl, a Namibian citizen, and Guillermo Delgado, a Mexican national, did not satisfy the requirements of the Citizenship Act in their application to have the child registered as a Namibian by descent.
Louw said she can relate to the well-intentioned and natural desire that those two gentlemen have – who lost the case on Monday – to have and raise a family of their own. She said she felt “a deep sense of sympathy and compassion at their very public loss on Monday. But the facts are that this type of environment is not what is best for the children.”
During their press conference in Windhoek, the groups also came out strongly against abortion. The contentious issue was brought into the public domain when deputy health minister Utjiua Muinjangue tabled a motion to debate abortion in Namibia in the National Assembly in 2020.
At the time, she asked the parliamentarians to discuss and debate the issue of abortion with the aim of considering it with sound and mature minds to make a decision that would benefit not only women, but the Namibian nation as a whole.
She argued that regardless of whether abortion was legal or not, young women and girls do backyard terminations of pregnancies, which not only affect them, but have an impact on other parts of society as well. Abortions can only be performed under strict medical supervision within the confines of the laws, which state that consent to abortion can only be given in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is in danger.
Despite this, abortion and baby dumping continue unabated in Namibia.
Louw said abortion does not discriminate based on colour, sex and social or economic status. It denies the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of the tiniest members of the human family.
Furthermore, she advised that if the reason why someone wants to abort is because they do not feel equipped to parent, “let us uplift the person with resources and access to support that will not only save the child, but actually develop the mother. The child is never the problem, and abortion will not address the socio-economic issues we are facing in this country.”
The chairperson of the Christian Coalition Shirley Magazi said the claim that sexual minority rights are human rights is faulty and baseless, and tantamount to disinformation and deception to Namibians. “Homosexual or LGBTQI rights do not exist. There is no agreed instrument at international or regional level that stipulates homosexuality or LGBTQI rights,” she stated.
She added that the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights does not recognise homosexual/LGBTQI rights.
“Those who claim to be LGBTQI are human beings, like any other person. Their rights are protected as humans (as everyone else), and not as LGBTQI. The Namibian Constitution has upheld the rights of all persons as humans as outlined in Article 10, in that ‘all persons shall be equal before the law.’ There is no special category called ‘gay rights’,” Magazi observed.
McDonald Kambonde, an ex-inmate at Oluno Prison, said at the press conference that “we say no to same-sex marriage and abortion. We do not hate these people, but we must tell them the truth because if we do not tell them, then we do not love them”.