Western ‘family values’ rhetoric undermines ubuntu and reproductive justice for all in Africa

Across the world, right-wing movements – often cloaked in the language of “moral and religious preservation” and “anti-wokeness” – are pushing back against progressive human rights advancing reproductive freedoms for women, girls and queer people.

Alarmingly, these movements are also gaining traction across parts of Africa, where significant strides have been made in embracing democracy, advancing constitutionalism and advocating non-racialism and reproductive freedoms in the post-colonial era.

Hard-won successes of progressive reproductive rights, including the promulgation of legal instruments such as the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (better known as the Maputo Protocol), are aimed at combating discrimination and violence against women and advancing reproductive rights for women and girls in Africa.

At least 44 out of 55 African Union member states have ratified the Maputo Protocol as of June 2023, and this has ensured that women and girls in most countries are guaranteed access to abortion and family planning services.

Right-wing lobbyists

In May 2025, feminist and reproductive justice organisations expressed their outrage when right-wing lobbyists from Europe and the United States of America held the Second Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference was convened to pass blame on abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights as the reason for a decline in Christian values and morality. Another conference, planned for 2027, will be hosted in South Africa.

One of the arguments raised at the conference was the likening of abortion and family planning to violence attributed to civil wars and post-election conflict.

Conservative groups in attendance argued that much like war, abortion access and family planning threatened human life and women’s fertility. But this could not be further from the truth.

In fact, one could argue that restricted access to abortion and family planning could amount to reproductive violence.

For instance, in the aftermath of the war in South Sudan in 2013, harsh restrictions on abortion and family planning were weaponised to force women into reproduction as a means of replacing the population lost after the war. This practice, often understood as “reproductive coercion”, reduced women’s agency to bearing children and denied them the right to choose when and how many children to have.

With little to no access to safe abortion care during that time, many women who did not want to continue their pregnancies resorted to seeking unsafe and often life-threatening abortions.

Unsafe abortion

Research from the Centre for Reproductive Rights indicates that restrictive laws on abortion access do not reduce abortions, and that, in fact, such restrictions increase unsafe abortion, as was the case in South Sudan.

The research also asserts that abortion, when performed in line with the WHO guidelines, is not harmful to women’s fertility, and neither is family planning. In fact, the WHO guidelines recommend post-abortion family planning care to prevent unwanted pregnancies and empower women to exercise bodily autonomy.

Family planning is a comprehensive approach to reproductive health as it goes beyond preventing unwanted pregnancies. It can empower individuals and couples to make informed choices about their reproductive health, including when and how many children to have.

To deny women and couples the ability to decide when and how to procreate is an oppressive approach to reproductive health freedoms and rights. It disregards the fact that sex is an equally pleasurable act, as much as it is an act of reproduction.

It also disregards the economic challenges that can come with raising children and the strife that this presents to people affected by systems of oppression.

Burden of young women and girls

Apart from a lack of vital sexual and reproductive health and rights information, young women and girls disproportionately carry the burden of unwanted pregnancies, HIV/Aids infections and poverty.

An analysis of research spanning three decades indicates that medically accurate and age-appropriate education delays early sexual debut and encourages the use of contraception methods.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, only 37% of young people in sub-Saharan Africa know about HIV/Aids prevention and transmission practices, and two out of three girls lack the knowledge they need to understand bodily changes during puberty and menstruation.

This is why Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is especially important for young women and girls. Contrary to what most conservative ideologues believe, CSE does not expose children to sex and explicit content. It is an educational approach that equips young people with the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to make informed and responsible decisions about their life outcomes and their bodies.

Assault on LGBTQIA+ people

Rightwing movements in Africa are not only attacking women’s and girls’ reproductive rights and freedoms, but also targeting LGBTQIA+ people.

In Uganda, for example, these movements falsely claimed in 2009 and again in 2024 that LGBTQIA+ identities are “un-African” and threaten traditional families. These rightwing movements often misuse culture and religion to spread falsities about queerness and homosexuality, ignoring that diverse sexual and gender identities have always existed in African societies.

Calling LGBTQIA+ people “Western imports” erases their history and denies them their rightful place in African culture.

The growing influence of the so-called family values movement across Africa is not a return to moral and religious authenticity, but a calculated attempt driven by foreign, evangelical, rightwing interests, to roll back hard-won human rights and freedoms under the guise of morality and religion. It threatens the autonomy, health and dignity of women, girls and LGBTQIA+ communities, while ignoring the real social crises that afflict African societies.

What Africa needs is not an irresponsible espousing of harmful, patriarchal values, but a strengthened recommitment to ubuntu.

That is, to affirm our shared humanity, dignity, and interdependence. True moral and religious leadership rests in creating societies where everyone, regardless of gender, sexuality or socioeconomic status, race, creed and geography, can live freely, safely, and with full access to opportunity and care. DM

Sesona Buyeye is the communication assistant at Ibis Reproductive Health and Duduetsang Mmeti is the associate communications director at Ibis. Both support Ibis’ communications efforts at advancing access to sexual and reproductive health in Africa. Ibis Reproductive Health is a global research organisation focused on sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice.