As a young girl without much education, Anwuli moved more than 500 km (or 300 miles) to the sprawling megacity of Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, to find work as a maid. She never imagined her employer, or “master” as the term is still used, a family man with two children, would rape her.

When Anwuli’s pregnant belly began showing, the man’s wife threw her out of the house before anyone could find out what her husband had done. Unemployed and living with a girl friend, Anwuli met a woman named Olive Iroegbu, a community health worker for a Christian organization that aims to educate youth about sexual health and help victims of sexual abuse.

Anwuli confided in Iroegbu about her abuse and her pregnancy, asking for help to get an abortion. She was six weeks into term.

“She came to me but the only option I knew then was to tell her to carry the pregnancy to term,” Iroegbu said, her hands tied partially by Nigeria’s strict laws against abortion and Christian beliefs that abortion in all cases is murder, a sin. But there is an intense stigma attached to single motherhood.

Anwuli visited a local pharmacy, where various abortion drugs are readily available but risky. With the pharmacist watching, Anwuli died on the floor. She was 23 years old.

“After that I started looking for better and safer options,” Iroegbu said. She now sees abortion as a civil right and not a sin. “We have lost a lot of young girls, including those in church, to an unsafe abortion. Even God would not want them to die so early.”

Nigerian hospitals commonly see women whose abortion attempts have gone wrong. Traditional healers and medical shop keepers use outdated and dangerous methods, sometimes bicycle spokes for example, to end a pregnancy. An estimated one-third of Nigerian women have had an abortion, according to the US-based Guttmacher Institute, and an estimated 50,000 women die annually from botched abortions, according to the Nigerian Medical Association.

So while her organization Champions’ Coalition, affiliated with a Pentecostal church, opposes abortion, Iroegbu believes legalizing abortion in Nigeria will reduce the maternal mortality rate and save thousands of lives. And that’s why she’s marching in the Lagos chapter of the Women’s Wave march.

The Women’s Wave Jan. 19-20 is the 2019 edition of the Women’s March on Washington, the DC-based initiative that went viral its first year in 2017 after Trump’s election and spread across every US state and many cities globally. The march’s founding women Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland have been battling several fracture lines. Pro-life women, many Evangelical Christians and Catholics, have felt sidelined after their groups were not recognized as official partners. (Access to safe abortion is a “unity principle” of the march.) This year, allegations of anti-Semitism have dampened the movement.