What Catholic Pro-lifers are Doing to Address Tanzania’s Declining Birthrate, Rise in Abortions

HLI’s President Fr. Shenan Boquet says, “What we are facing is not an economic or a social problem. What we are facing is a heart problem, a spiritual problem.”

Tanzania is listed among the 25 countries with the highest abortion rates in the world, HLI says, adding that the rate of abortion in the East African country is “more than two and a half times that of the United States.”

In Tanzania, more than half of the almost 70 million populace practices Christianity. Of these, more than a third are Catholics, HLI says, and noting that the disconnect in the country is that the Catholic Church is doctrinally and unapologetically pro-life, yet Tanzania’s abortion rate is among the highest in the world.

Through education, the pro-life ministry hopes to convey the understanding of what God’s Word and the Catholic Church teach about human dignity. Participants in the program are equipped to take the same message into their respective communities.

HLI Tanzania began training Catholic Priests in 2002, in the country’s Catholic Diocese of Mbulu and is currently working with Major Seminarians at Kipalapala, Segerea, and Peramiho.

The Clergy, the Catholic pro-life agency says, come from a traditional African culture that values family and perceives children as blessings.

However, according to HLI Tanzania, the Priests are ministering in communities that have been targeted by abortion-promoting organizations from the West. 

In Tanzania, HLI also works with students and educators to teach foetal development. 

The pro-life ministry says that its youth-oriented chastity education started in 2000 and has been welcomed into the classroom at 200 schools in Tanzania, both secular and religious. 

Emil Hagamu, Regional Director of English-Speaking Africa at HLI, shares how at a recent visit to Canossa High School in Dar es Salaam, he spoke with 350 middle school students. 

Hagamu addressed chastity and God’s plan for human sexuality and showed them a video of a baby growing in its mother’s womb. The assembly ended with the youth pledging to live chastely and honour the sanctity of human life.

HLI says that because Tanzania, along with the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, is “a frequent target of population control efforts”, the programs of the Catholic pro-lifers in the country focus heavily on “countering the western-funded promotion of abortion and contraception” in the region.

Hagamu, along with his Tanzanian team of counsellors in more than 60 different education centers, works to stem the damage caused by what HLI describes as a “culture of death” through which pro-abortion entities claim to fight poverty. 

In reality however, according to Hagamu, the abortion culture “simply turns large poor families into small poor families.”

One of the ways in which HLI Tanzania has honoured and upheld African culture’s traditional welcome of children is through its Natural Family Planning (NFP) awareness program. 

(Story continues below)

In the program, trained counsellors teach couples how to practice a form of family planning that strengthens marriages, and does not interfere with natural reproductive processes, promote disease, or act as an abortifacient. 

According to the pro-life ministry, close to 25,000 Tanzanian couples have adopted the life-affirming family planning since the inception of the program in 2019.

But at the heart of HLI Tanzania is the focus on saving preborn babies from abortion. The organization’s worldwide training of Priests, Seminarians, nurses, midwives, educators, and laypeople revolves around the key tenet that all human life is precious. 

HLI Tanzania’s daily work with schools, churches, individuals, and families, concentrates on fostering a culture that helps mothers and families choose life for their children.

Dr. Brian Clowes, HLI Director of Education and Research, has described the entity’s mission in Tanzania as “very fruitful.”