In Perfect Sense-Making

[Trigger warning.]

Chansa Kabwela, the news editor of Zambia's largest independent (i.e. not government-owned) newspaper, The Post, is currently on trial after sending "two photographs of a woman giving birth without medical help to the country's vice-president, health minister and rights groups," in an attempt to raise awareness about the dire state of the nation's healthcare system and encourage them to settle the nurse's strike.

The Post's news editor Ms Kabwela did not publish the controversial photographs, but sent copies to a number of prominent people and women's rights groups, along with a letter calling for the strike to be brought to an end.

…The pictures are graphic. They show a woman in the process of giving birth to a baby in the breech position - when the baby's legs come out first. Its shoulders, legs and arms are visible, but the head has not yet been delivered. The photos were apparently taken in the grounds of Lusaka's main hospital.

The nurses were on strike and the woman had been turned away from two clinics. By the time doctors operated, the baby had suffocated. Ms Kabwela says she was given the photographs by the woman's relatives.

President Banda expressed his outrage at a news conference, calling the photographs pornographic.

He subsequently called for a police investigation, because pornography is illegal in Zambia. Kabwela was arrested and charged with—make sure you're sitting down lest the irony bowl you over—"distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals."

Which strikes me a little bit like the Zambian government is admitting that their morals include abandoning birthing women and babies to distress and death, and that damn Kabwela was trying to corrupt them with her zany insistence on expecting more.

Sign the petition to acquit Chansa Kabwela here.

[H/T to Shaker ImTheMarigold.]