Eddie Mhlanga, the devout doctor who reconciled faith with abortion
In October 1996, as South Africa’s National Assembly found itself embroiled in bitter debate over a bill to legalize abortion, a soft-spoken doctor from the country’s Department of Health stood up to speak.
“I am a born-again Christian, amen,” began Dr. Eddie Mhlanga, the department’s director of maternal health. And then he began to tell a conversion story of another kind.
As a young doctor in the early 1980s, he explained, he had operated on a colleague following a botched informal abortion. Then, he said, he asked for help.
“Every day I was at her bedside praying that God would have mercy on her,” he explained to the members of Parliament, who had gathered to consider whether South Africa should roll back an apartheid-era law that had in the country.
