05-05-2025
Dr Dusi, Dr Google, stigma and all the other reasons pregnant women are risking their lives
There are piles of R100 notes, a hand holding a tinted vial, a small plastic bag of brown herbs and a bloody sanitary pad with a message in green type: 'Thank you Dr Dusi. Now I'm Free.' There is also a phone number where, presumably, you'll find someone at the other end of the line eager to help.
If Dr Dusi doesn't pick up, or, more likely, has changed his number, don't worry. There are plenty of others to call. Dozens of them.
On a Friday afternoon in late April this year, the comments stream in a local Facebook group with over 2,800 members was flowing.
Along with an unending scroll of images advertising 'abortion pills' with 'hand to hand' delivery, 'womb cleaning', 'surgical abortions with same day service' and 'pain free' terminations, the comments were packed with offers to pregnant women from Gugulethu to Germiston and all points in between.
Just a call and you, too, could be free.
The group has the name of a well-respected legal abortion provider. But it isn't. It's just parading as one.
That's just one way virtual platforms are serving up very real, and often very dangerous, ways for women to end their pregnancies — even though abortion, when done correctly, is a safe, and legal, medical procedure that many government hospitals and clinics do for free.
So why would anyone call Dr Dusi instead?
Heartbreakingly simple
Sometimes it is heartbreakingly simple: some people don't even know that legal abortion clinics exist.
Elna McIntosh, who founded the Disa Clinic in Johannesburg, a private clinic which offers safe abortions for a fee, recently counselled a woman who had been misled by a dodgy clinic in Sandton.
'So she went there, and they told her she was 26 weeks pregnant but they offered her a termination. [They told her] 'It's all right, we're gonna sort everything out ... don't cry, don't cry.' But she then wanted a second opinion,' McIntosh told Bhekisisa's monthly TV show Health Beat in April, when our team visited the facility.
