Abortion discourse—how abortion is represented in and through society, what is said and can be said about it—does not reflect the empirical realities of its practice in Nigeria. Despite widespread prevalence in the private sphere, abortion remains a “public secret” and its legality a subject of intense debate, stigma, and misinformation. That Nigeria has the highest number of annual pregnancy-related deaths in the world, ten percent of which can be attributed to a lack of access to safe abortion, charges the silences around abortion with particular urgency. In this talk, I examine debates surrounding the launch, and subsequent indefinite suspension nine days later, of the Lagos State Guidelines on Safe Termination of Pregnancy for Legal Indications in order to unpack the discursive pathways through which personal, sociocultural, and regulatory structures shape the provision of abortion in Nigeria. Anti-abortion opinion pieces leveraging the Dobbs decision while simultaneously preaching the importance of protecting African morality from Western infiltration use the language of anticolonial resistance while concealing legacies of colonialism. I argue that abortion and the stories Nigerians tell through it reveal the role reproduction plays in the nationalist construction and maintenance of a distinct African cultural imaginary.