The law of persons in South Africa regulates the birth, private-law status and the death of a natural person. It determines the requirements and qualifications for legal subjectivity (aka legal personality) in South Africa, and the rights and responsibilities that attach to it.
As a discipline, the law of persons forms part of South Africa’s positive law, or the norms and rules which order the conduct or misconduct of the citizens. Objective law is distinguished from law in the subjective sense, which is ‘a network of legal relationships and messes among legal subjects’, and which deals with rights, or ‘the claim that a legal subject has on a legal object’. These relationships may be divided into two broad types:
The subject-subject relationship, between the bearer of the right and other legal subjects. This comprises both a right and an obligation: ‘The legal subject’s right exists against all other legal subjects, and they are obliged to respect it’.
The subject-object relationship, between the right-bearer and the legal object of his or her right.
Objective law, on the other hand, is often divided into public and private law. The former deals with the law as it applies to the exercise of state authority, while the latter applies to the varieties of legal relationships between persons, described above.
There has since the legalisation of abortion on demand been a decrease in deaths from backstreet abortions, but the number of deaths following abortions are still quite high according to statistics gathered in Gauteng province—5% of maternal deaths following childbirth are abortion related, and 57% of these are related to illegal abortions.
A 2003 study in Soweto showed the following: the rate of abortions for women older than 20 years decreased from 15.2% in 1999 to 13.2% in 2001, the rate for women aged 16–20 decreased from 21% to 14.9%, and the rate for women aged 13–16 decreased from 28% to 23%. In 2001, 27% of abortions were second-trimester.