Dear Editor,
I am not sure who reads posts by the Ministry of Health, but I found a recent one particularly amusing. It spoke of “strengthening oversight mechanisms” and its “continued commitment to safeguarding women’s health…” Give me a break. The opportunity for these very positive claims was a meeting of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Board which included the Honourable Minister of Health.
The Advisory Board, established in the Regulations of the 1995 Act, was specifically defined as a body composed of representatives from non-governmental entities. At 6. (2) The provision reads: “The Advisory Board shall be broad-based and balanced, consisting of not more than nine members chosen from non-governmental organisations, such as religious, legal and medical organisations.”
The idea of those of us who crafted this novel provision was to create a dispassionate platform on which advocates and adversaries would sit together and monitor the performance of the law based on data from Form F, gather other information, and make recommendations to the Minister. It was to be independent of the Ministry. It was to function as a mechanism of accountability for the Ministry and transparency to its stakeholders.
Last year, I wrote to the Minister and pointed out that the Board he had appointed was not consistent with the Regulations. For seven (7) of the nine (9) members he appointed were government employees, and five (5) them were within the Ministry of Health. (Gazette, Feb 6, 2025, Legal Supplement B) That is a non-starter. We are asking the ministry to monitor itself. This is not oversight. And it certainly is not non-governmental. Why not ask the inmates to manage the asylum?
Of course, I got no reply. Some weeks later, I wrote to him again. Same result. This non-responsiveness is par for the course. The contempt of government ministers for the law is matched only by the inertia of a community that refuses to hold them accountable.