Note: This article discusses abortion, sexual violence and reproductive healthcare. It is intended as a cultural and informational discussion of the documentary and does not provide medical advice or instructions for obtaining or performing an abortion.
There are some conversations Nigerian society has perfected the art of having without actually having. Abortion is one of them. We talk around it. We lower our voices when we mention it. We tell girls to “be careful.” We tell women that they will regret their decisions. We invoke religion, morality, family honour and shame. We warn against “bad friends.” And when something goes wrong, we ask why she did not know better.
But what happens when we actually listen to the women? That is the question at the heart of filmmaker Chika Okoli’s Care or Control?, a short documentary-style project that examines the silenced realities surrounding pregnancy termination and reproductive health choices in Nigeria. The documentary brings together the experiences of Nigerian women of different ages and backgrounds, alongside perspectives from experts in medicine, academia and psychology. The women’s stories give the issue its emotional reality, while perspectives from psychology, gynaecology and academia provide another layer through which to understand what we are watching. Together, they allow the conversation to move beyond individual anecdotes and the usual cycle of judgement.
The result is uncomfortable in the best possible way: it forces the viewer to sit with the fact that there is no single “abortion story.” There can be fear. There can be relief. There can be trauma. There can be stigma. There can be secrecy. But many times, at the core of it all, there is simply a woman trying to make a decision about her own life in a system that has already made several decisions for her.
Here are five reasons Care or Control? deserves your attention. (P.S: If you read till the end, you stand a chance to win an STI Test Kit)
1. It Finally Kills the “Single Abortion Story” Myth
If Nigerian conversations about abortion were a Nollywood movie, we would probably have one familiar plot. Girl gets pregnant. Girl panics. Girl regrets it. Girl suffers. Girl learns a lesson. Care or Control? complicates that script.
One of the documentary’s most striking stories is that of Victory, who became pregnant at 13 after being raped. Now 26, she looks back on an experience that could easily have been reduced to a story about trauma and tragedy. But Victory’s story contains something people often struggle to acknowledge: relief can exist alongside trauma. Not every woman who terminates a pregnancy experiences the same emotions. Some experience grief. Some experience fear. Some feel conflicted. Some feel relief. Some experience several of these emotions at once. Human beings are multifaceted like that.
Victory’s story becomes even more disturbing because the doctor treating her allegedly subjected her to humiliating verbal abuse during the procedure, telling her to “sit down in one place” and threatening to chook her with a pin. Think about that for a moment. A child who had become pregnant after rape was not only navigating the consequences of sexual violence, she was also vulnerable to mistreatment within the healthcare system. And then there was Semilogo and Tomilola, whose stories offer different experiences.
These stories matter because while statistics can tell us how many women are affected, stories can show us what being one of those women feels like. And perhaps that is one of the documentary’s most important contributions: it makes it harder to talk about “women who have abortions” as though they are one homogeneous group. They aren’t. They are teenagers and adults. They are students, wives, daughters, professionals and survivors of sexual violence. At different points, they may experience any of these feelings, sometimes moving from one to another as their circumstances change.
2. It Debunks the Myths Your Uncles and Aunties Swear Are True
One of the most useful things a documentary can do is make you realise how much of what you “know” is actually something somebody told you at a family meeting. Don’t take that pill. You’ll never have children again. Abortion always causes infertility. Women who have abortions are traumatised forever. If abortion is illegal, women simply won’t have abortions. These are the kinds of things that get repeated so often that they start to sound like facts. Care or Control? does something more useful: it puts some of those assumptions under the microscope and replaces hearsay with evidence.
Take the distinction between safe and unsafe abortion. The World Health Organization defines abortion as safe when it is carried out using a recommended method appropriate to the duration of the pregnancy and by someone with the necessary skills. Unsafe abortion, by contrast, occurs when those conditions are not met. Globally, around 45 per cent of abortions are classified as unsafe, with the overwhelming majority occurring in developing countries. And “unsafe” is not just a clinical label that sounds frightening on paper. It can mean severe bleeding, infection, incomplete abortion, uterine perforation and damage to the genital tract or internal organs. Unsafe abortion remains a preventable contributor to maternal death and serious illness. The documentary makes these consequences feel less like distant statistics because we actually watch them unfold through Tomilola’s story. Her experience gives the facts a human face. Suddenly, “the complications of unsafe abortion” is no longer a phrase buried in a WHO report. It is a woman describing what happened to her body, her choices and her life. That is where Care or Control? becomes particularly effective: it gives you the statistics, and then makes you sit with what those statistics can look like in reality.
Nigeria’s numbers make the conversation even harder to ignore. A nationally representative study of women aged 15–49 found that 63.4 per cent of reported abortions involved a non-recommended method obtained from a non-clinical or no provider — a category the researchers described as “most unsafe.” Among adolescents aged 15–19, the proportion was even higher, at 87.8 per cent. Then there is the wider maternal-health crisis. Nigeria had an estimated maternal mortality ratio of 1,047 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020. That was more than four times the global estimate of 223 deaths per 100,000 live births, and Nigeria accounted for an estimated 28.5 per cent of maternal deaths worldwide that year.
These figures matter because they complicate some of the easy answers we hear about abortion. Saying “just don’t have an abortion” does not make unintended pregnancies disappear. Saying “abortion is dangerous” without distinguishing between safe and unsafe abortion leaves out an enormous part of the medical picture. And saying “if it is illegal, women simply will not do it” ignores the reality that restrictions do not eliminate the need for abortion — they can affect the circumstances in which women obtain it.
That is ultimately what makes Care or Control? worth watching. It does not ask you to accept another set of slogans about abortion. It asks you to look beyond the things your aunties, uncles, religious leaders, friends or social media have confidently told you and ask a much simpler question: Do we actually know this or have we just heard it enough times to believe it?
3. It Forces You To Ask an Uncomfortable Question: When Does Care Become Control?
The title Care or Control? is doing a lot of work. Reproductive healthcare is often framed as an exercise in protection. We want to “protect” women, girls, families, unborn children and society. But who gets to decide what protection looks like? And what happens when the measures designed to protect someone also limit her choices? That is the uncomfortable question the documentary keeps placing on the table.
When a woman cannot access the healthcare she needs because of the law, stigma, religion, cost or fear of judgement, what happens to her autonomy? And when the consequences of that lack of access can be physical, psychological and social, can we still describe the system as protective without asking who is being protected, from what, and at what cost? This is where Care or Control? becomes bigger than a documentary about abortion. It becomes a conversation about bodily autonomy, agency and who gets to make decisions about a woman’s body.
Because it is one thing to have an opinion about what another woman should do. It is another thing entirely to be the woman who has to live with the consequences of that decision. For one woman, a pregnancy may be deeply wanted. For another, it may be the result of rape or coercion. Another may be a teenager, already raising children, struggling financially, facing a serious health risk, or simply certain that she does not want to continue the pregnancy. These circumstances are not interchangeable, and perhaps the women living through them should not be reduced to one neat moral category either. And this is where the title really lands. Is the system caring for women, or controlling them?
Perhaps the uncomfortable part is that the answer is not always obvious. Policies can be created in the language of protection while producing consequences that feel very different to the people living under them. Care or Control? does not ask viewers to abandon their beliefs or values. Instead, it asks us to examine what happens when those beliefs become laws, restrictions, healthcare policies and real-life consequences. Because it is easy to debate abortion as an abstract idea. It is much harder when the argument has a face, a name and a story. That is what makes Care or Control? worth watching. It does not allow us to stay comfortably behind the word “abortion” as though it were an abstract political or moral issue. It puts actual women back at the centre of the conversation — and suddenly, the policy debate is no longer just about what we believe. It is about who has to live with what we decide.
4. It Reveals A Lot About the Law We Were Never Taught
You can be a fully grown Nigerian adult and still discover that the law governing abortion is considerably more complicated than simply saying, “Abortion is illegal.” As noted above, Nigeria operates under two principal criminal-law frameworks relating to abortion: the Criminal Code Act, generally applicable in the southern states, and the Penal Code Act, generally applicable in the northern states.
Under sections 228 to 230 of the Criminal Code Act, offences include unlawfully procuring a miscarriage, attempting to procure one’s own miscarriage, and unlawfully supplying drugs or instruments for that purpose. Under sections 232 to 234 of the Penal Code, the law similarly addresses causing a miscarriage and other related offences. In other words, the legal framework does not simply regulate medical practitioners. Depending on the circumstances, it can also expose a pregnant woman and other people involved in an unlawful abortion to criminal liability. But Care or Control? also takes us somewhere a textbook on abortion law probably would not: behind the scenes of attempts to change the law and make existing legal exceptions actually work.
One of the documentary’s more revealing moments is learning about attempts to introduce legal provisions that would have permitted abortion in circumstances such as rape and incest — proposals that came close to becoming law but ultimately faced significant opposition. The story of Imo State is particularly striking. In 2012, the state’s Violence Against Persons Prohibition Law contained a provision permitting abortion in cases of rape and incest. Following strong opposition, including objections from religious leaders and traditional rulers, that provision was subsequently repealed. Something remarkably similar played out in Lagos more recently. In June 2022, the Lagos State Government launched its Guidelines on Safe Termination of Pregnancy for Legal Indications, a 40-page document intended to help health professionals provide safe abortion where termination was already permitted under the law. The guidelines were developed to clarify the circumstances in which legal termination could be provided and to reduce preventable deaths (especially the staggering deaths of teenage girls) resulting from the absence of clear standards. The state suspended the guidelines just days after their launch, following religious, cultural and philosophical objections. By 2023, civil-society organisations, medical practitioners and other stakeholders were still publicly calling for the guidelines to be reinstated.
That history is fascinating because it shows that abortion law is not simply a fixed set of rules that appeared one day and never changed. There have been attempts to expand legal protections, attempts to clarify existing exceptions, moments when broader access appeared within reach, and significant resistance to those changes. Behind the sections and subsections are debates about religion, culture, medicine, women’s rights, politics and the role of the state in regulating reproductive choices.
None of this, by itself, tells us whether the law should or should not change. But it does give us a reason to look beyond the words of the statute and ask how those words got there in the first place and whose values, beliefs and interests have shaped them over time. This is part of what makes Care or Control? so interesting. It does not just tell you what the law says; it gives you a glimpse of the history, politics, resistance and human stories behind the words on the page. And frankly, knowing the law governing your body should not require you to become a law student first.
5. It Reminds Women That They Are Not Alone
Perhaps the most human reason to watch Care or Control? is that sometimes, what a woman needs to hear most is simply: “You are not the only one.”
Reproductive healthcare can be incredibly isolating. A woman may sit alone with a positive pregnancy test, unsure of what to do next. She may tell no one. She may be afraid of her parents, her partner, her church, her doctor, the law or even her own reaction to what is happening. And because abortion remains heavily stigmatised, many women rarely get to hear other women speak honestly about their experiences. That silence can be dangerous. Not because every woman should arrive at the same decision, but because women deserve access to accurate information, honest conversations and the reassurance that they are not uniquely broken or alone in facing a difficult situation. There is something quietly radical about hearing women talk about reproductive decisions without immediately forcing their experiences into a morality tale.
I particularly appreciated Semilogo’s openness about the way she once thought an abortion would ruin her life somewhere down the line. There is something powerful about hearing her acknowledge that fear while also speaking from the perspective of where she is now. She no longer sees her abortion as something that has permanently derailed her future; she has continued to build a life for herself and is thriving in her own space. Her story does not erase whatever she may have felt at the time. Instead, it challenges the assumption that every woman who has an abortion must inevitably carry the same emotional aftereffect forever.
There is no single emotional script for what a woman is supposed to feel after a pregnancy or an abortion. Maybe the woman regrets it. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she is traumatised or relieved. Maybe she feels nothing she can neatly name. Maybe she simply knows that she made the best decision she could with the information, circumstances and options available to her at the time. All of those possibilities can exist. And perhaps that is the point. We need more conversations where women can speak honestly without immediately being reduced to a cautionary tale, a political argument or a moral lesson. Conversations where information comes before judgement and listening comes before assumptions. Sometimes knowing that someone else has been there too does not solve the problem. But it can make an incredibly difficult experience feel a little less lonely.
So, Should You Watch It?
Yes — if you can handle a documentary that refuses to give you the comfort of a simple answer.
Care or Control? is not simply about abortion. It is about what happens when law, healthcare, religion, culture, trauma, gender and personal choice collide inside one woman’s life. It asks what happens when a teenager becomes pregnant after rape. It asks what happens when a woman seeks healthcare and encounters judgement or humiliation instead. It asks what happens when the state decides the boundaries of reproductive choice. It asks why some women’s stories are treated as evidence while others are dismissed as exceptions. And perhaps most importantly, it asks what “care” actually means. Because care without listening can become control. Protection without information can become paternalism. And silence, however well-intentioned, does not make difficult realities disappear.
And honestly, the documentary made me sad. And angry. Sad because so many of the stories feel like reminders of how vulnerable women can become when the systems meant to protect them fail to meet them with dignity, information or compassion. Angry because some of the suffering feels preventable, not necessarily because every pregnancy has a simple solution, but because shame, misinformation, stigma and barriers to healthcare can make already difficult circumstances even harder.
But Care or Control? does not turn these women into victims for us to pity and move on from. The women in the documentary are not statistics. They are not morality lessons. They are not symbols in somebody else’s argument. They are women telling us what happened to them — sometimes painfully, sometimes matter-of-factly, sometimes with the kind of honesty that makes you wish you could look away. So, maybe the least we can do is listen. And perhaps that is the documentary’s greatest strength. It does not demand that everyone watching arrive at the same conclusion about abortion. Instead, it asks us to sit with the complexity, question what we think we know, and consider what our laws, beliefs and choices actually mean for the women who have to live with their consequences.
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Sometimes, the most important part of a difficult conversation is knowing what to do with the information afterwards.
