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Posted on 02/20/2026 6:11:09 AM PST by Morgana
Violet Zulu sits in a two-room home in Lusaka with no running water, trying to rebuild her life at twenty-six. She earns about forty dollars a month cleaning houses. She begs for food at times so her two little boys can eat. Her partner abandoned her when she became pregnant a third time.
She told reporters, “I never wanted to abort my pregnancy, but it is the circumstances at home that forced me to do it.” That sentence breaks the heart. She did not crave abortion. She feared hunger. She loved her sons and believed that another child would starve them all, and she wasn’t aware of her options.
The news story that tells her story treats abortion as the answer that failed to arrive in time. It blames the clinic that turned her away, the pharmacy that charged too much for abortion pills, and the justice system that sent her to prison after she drank an herbal poison and delivered her baby into a toilet. It presents greater access to abortion as the obvious lesson.
That one-sided frame hides the real tragedy. Violet and her unborn child needed something very different.
Trace what happened.
Her partner left. No one required him to support his children. No court. No community council.
Her poverty pressed on every choice. She already struggled to feed two boys. And in that fear, she turned to the public clinic. Staff there had a chance to speak the truth and offer tangible help and mercy. The clinic turned her away without real help.
She tried a private pharmacy next. The pharmacist demanded about one month of her wages for abortion drugs. Violet could not pay. And still no one offered her the contacts to the resources that could have saved her child. She remained alone with her fear.
Without knowing where to go, she drank an herbal brew that neighbors described as a way to bring on a miscarriage. After she delivered the tiny body of her child in a toilet, she tied that little one in a sack and dropped the bundle into a stream. Someone learned what happened and called the police. The court then sentenced her to seven years in a maximum-security prison. She had no lawyer. She did not understand the law. She thought a guilty plea would bring a warning.
Every step of this story shows a system that pushed her toward death instead of walking with her toward life.
The Associated Press reporters quote abortion rights advocates who insist that Violet simply needed easier access to legal abortion. They call for “better education” about how to obtain abortions. They point to international rights groups that champion her case.
What they never mention matters just as much.
Silent Voices Pregnancy Center and Maternity Home has served women in crisis pregnancies in Zambia since the late 1990s. Staff there offer counseling, food, housing, and practical support. They have helped thousands of mothers choose life and have welcomed mothers into a maternity home when home life collapsed.
The Association for Life of Africa coordinates a network of pregnancy help centers across the continent, including in Zambia. Other ministries, such as Khumi Children’s Village in Kitwe and local crisis pregnancy centers in Kabwe, stand ready to help women who fear another mouth to feed. Churches throughout the country, including Catholic parishes and evangelical congregations, run food programs and maternal shelters.
None of these efforts appears in the article. Not once do the authors ask, “Could anyone have helped Violet keep her baby? Who offers mothers in Zambia another path?” They quote only voices that treat abortion as the core right that Violet deserved and lost.
When a story presents a woman as a symbol for one side of a political campaign and never acknowledges that life-affirming help exists, that story stops being neutral reporting. It becomes advocacy. In this instance, the advocacy was paid for by the Gates Foundation, which made the article possible.
Zambia calls itself a Christian nation. The law already recognizes that abortion ends a human life and protects unborn children. Instead of using Violet’s pain to demand more abortions, the country can learn a better lesson.
Zambian leaders can strengthen outreach from pregnancy help centers to poor neighborhoods. Churches can make sure every parish knows where to send a woman in a situation similar to Violet’s. Pro-life groups can build legal defense teams that focus penalties on those who profit from abortion, not on mothers crushed by poverty and fear.
International partners who truly care about African women can invest in food programs, maternal shelters, and educational scholarships instead of lobbying for more ways to end unborn lives
Violet Zulu’s story should break hearts in every country. A mother who “never wanted to abort” believed that death stood as her only option. A baby died. A young woman went to prison.
The answer to that tragedy does not lie in access to abortion. It lies in strong, visible, life-affirming support that reaches women before despair does. That support already exists in Zambia. The world needs to hear about it. And Violet deserves a future where her community does not offer her a dead child and a prison cell, but a living baby in her arms and neighbors at her side.
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Why doesn't the article address the real question of her lack of sufficient commitment to her existing children to motivate keeping her knees together?
Grok summary:
Violet Zulu, a 26-year-old Zambian house cleaner earning $40 a month, was abandoned by her partner during her third pregnancy and, fearing starvation for her two young sons, sought an abortion she didn’t truly want. Denied affordable access at a public clinic and unable to pay for pills at a pharmacy, she resorted to a dangerous herbal brew, miscarried into a toilet, and was sentenced to seven years in maximum-security prison after a botched self-representation—no lawyer, no understanding of options. The mainstream story (backed by Gates Foundation funding) frames this as a failure of abortion access and pushes for easier terminations, ignoring existing life-affirming alternatives like Silent Voices Pregnancy Center, Association for Life of Africa networks, church food programs, and maternity homes in Zambia that provide real support—food, housing, counseling—to help women choose life instead of despair, death for the child, and prison for the mother. The true tragedy isn’t lack of abortion; it’s a system and media narrative that failed to connect her to the help that already exists before she reached that breaking point.
Quite a tear jerker story from an organization that is US based and US right to life but this is in Africa. Sounds like they are begging for cash using a TWSH as a backdrop. Sad but I don’t care about Africa but I do care about the good old USA and the problems we have here. Much like all organizations that start with good intent, it becomes a business and the bottom line. Beg for cash and use whatever means to get that cash while less than 5% goes to the stated cause.
What would you say if she had been raped? That it was ‘all her fault’?
I don’t see how the point of the story - a complete lack of resources for a woman in this position - would be any different.
Don't know. It would depend upon the facts of the case.
Well, violet, you didn’t have to,spread your legs for that turd that knocked you up.
Should a baby be executed for the sins of a rapist?
Abortion wasn’t the only service this woman was lacking. Read the article, the point of which is that she lacked information and access to pro-life resources.
(But I do think there are cruelties as bad or worse than death, and I don’t believe issues like abortion should be decided rigidly or the same in every case. I’ve discussed this here many times before, and I don’t need to discuss it again.)
I’m not on the same plane. I don’t think a baby should be executed for the convenience of the mother or to pay for the sins of the sperm donor.
Females are raped all the time. Rape doesn’t involve just a ‘sperm donor’. It’s a horribly violent act that scars a woman for life. And especially when it happens to a very young girl, or a victim of incest, forcing the female to carry the child just compounds the psychological burden. Resolving that isn’t mere ‘convenience’.
You live on your plane, conforming to rigid rules that don’t change with the case. I’ll live on mine, even though it’s much more difficult to practice intelligent discernment and to accept that circumstances alter cases.
I will take the side of life and be fine with it.
Then I suppose you are against capital punishment.
Women who are raped are offered birth control at the ER.
What does that have to do with anything?
Abortion doesn’t come into the equation if there is no child. The birth control keeps the child from happening.
What sin did a baby commit to deserve a death sentence? And yes. I am against capital punishment.
I’m not sure who you are talking about. A lot of women - and minors - who are raped are not on birth control because they had no need to be.
And the woman in this story apparently wasn’t a victim of rape, but wasn’t steered toward any helpful solution *except* abortion.
Once again, they give you pills to prevent pregnancy at the ER after you are raped.
AT least you are consistent re: capital punishment.
Thanks for the conversation.
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