One of the
biggest news stories to come out of the USA in the last month was the leaked
memo that stated that the Supreme Court was planning of reversing “Roe vs
Wade” the landmark legislation that guaranteed the right to an abortion. In
the aftermath of this piece of news, a host of states started to pass anti-abortion
legislation.
My experience with
abortion is personal. I had to send my then girlfriend for an abortion because
she got pregnant and it was clear that despite her efforts to tell my parents
that we’d get married and raise the child, that we were in no position to raise
a child. Having seen her through the abortion period, I am aware that abortion
is not a pleasant experience no matter how you slice and dice it. However, it
was a blessing for us to terminate the pregnancy. We wanted different things and
she turned violent during the marriage. There was no way for us to last as a
couple and when we left each other, we did so cleanly – it was just us separating.
There was no kid in between and we could walk away from each other.
Sure, one could
say that I’m being punished for that since at the age of 47, it looks unlikely
that I’ll never father my own flesh and blood. However, I prefer to think that I
was opened up to the blessing of adopting the evil young woman and having Yooga
(Joyce’s son) in my life.
My views on
abortion are in line with Lee Kuan Yew’s on prostitution. It’s an unpleasant thing
but better for it to be legal, in the open and under proper medical care. My
old English teacher (a woman) said that although she didn’t believe in abortion,
the alternatives were inevitably worse and we’d probably have less healthy
young women around as quite a few would have died or damaged their ability to
reproduce from illegal abortions.
The problem
with the issue of abortion is like the problem of the real estate dispute in
the Levant – namely the fact that too many people have assigned themselves as
agents of God and too many of those people have decided that God has given them
the exclusive to police what other people do in the bedroom. It should be
telling that an NBC poll found that the majority of people who believed that
abortion should be illegal are evangelical Christian.
This is the
same community that believes that teaching school children of the existence of
contraception is to encourage them to have pre-marital sex. It is clear that
this community lives in a world where people are saints and have the ability to
behave according to the rules imposed on them by the rest of society. It would
seem that the evangelical community is living in paradise where no poverty, war
and pestilence exist.
However, as was
said by Benjamin Sisko, the head of Deep Space Nine, a run-down space station
in the Star Trek franchise – “it’s easy to be a saint in paradise,” and the
reality is that most of us do not live in paradise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGO1qjIr5E
Let’s start
with the fact that many of us who don’t live in paradise have normal sexual urges
and despite the advances in birth control and knowledge, this can go out of the
window when the happy hormones of a sexual encounter get into play. I should
know.
Whenever the
topic of my first marriage comes out, my mother will inevitably ask “Why wasn’t
birth control in your hands?” Well, as it stupid as it sounds, I didn’t believe
it would ever happen to me. This was not a “Geylang Girl,” but someone who had
been a virgin at the age of 28, which was a fact that she’d remind me of whenever
I tried to suggest that her going for an abortion was not my sole responsibility.
Accidents do
happen. Unplanned an unwanted pregnancy happen. So, what can be done? Angelina
Jolie has shown us that adoption does allow children that are not wanted to
find a wanted home. However, not everyone is prepared to give up their kids to
a stranger and let’s not forget that a woman will have to carry the child for
nine months before then, something which can be traumatic if the mother in question
has a psychological precondition against seeing the pregnancy through as in the
case of incest and rape (things that apparently don’t happen in evangelical
paradise)
Then there’s
the link between unwanted pregnancy and poverty. It was found that in 2014 some
49 percent of abortion patients lived below the federal poverty line:
https://www.guttmacher.org/report/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2014
Why would women
living in poverty seek to have an abortion? Since this is not evangelical
paradise, the logical answer would be that they are simply not in the position to
support another mouth. If one were to dig into the poverty figures even
further, one might find that these were women whose partners bailed on them the
moment the foetus started to take shape. How do children usually turn out.
Well, according to a World Bank report, “
https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/WHATCAUS.PDF
Abortion is not
something nice. It should never be a substitute for proper contraception. A condom
and contraception pills can ensure that unwanted pregnancies don’t happen. It
is better to pay $10 for a packet of condoms than $4,000 for an abortion.
Having said all
of that, mistakes will happen and it is better to have an unpleasant procedure
done in a hospital with proper hygiene than to have women dying in back allies
or unwanted children growing in environments where criminalities are normal. Just
because something is not nice doesn’t mean that it should be illegal.
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