Un désir d’enfant non abouti ? Grossesse et avortement chez les jeunes femmes à Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)

Abstract

Procreation in Burkinabe society is subject to an important social promotion to the point that to evoke the desire for children falls almost like a truism, as it seems evident. As a social construct assigned with a range of private as well as societal issues, the desire for children is rarely linked to abortion, which is considered as a lack of child desire when pregnancy occurs. However, studying the process of induced abortion among young people in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, shows that some pregnancies are planned, desired and deliberately interrupted. The objective of this article is to explain these “unachieved child desires” and the contexts in which they occur. Individual interviews with young women and single men reveal a child desire for both women and men which can simply be used as bargaining chips in gender relations in which young men and women are inserted. Thus, constraints along the route to adulthood, as well as the dominant ideologies and pressures around marriage, procreation and social success, increasingly induce the occurrence and materialization of the child desire among young people. It appears as a strategy among a plurality of other strategies whose purpose is to get married (or impose a relationship) and/or reach “social success”. However, once pregnancy occurs, the breaking of matrimonial projects and premarital childbearing related stigma combine to represent a risk to young life trajectory, and hence force the resort to abortion.