Shags and Fags.

The Governor of the State of Alabama, Ms. Kay Ivey has brought the issue of abortion back into the front pages of the world’s newspapers by signing what is perhaps the most stringent “anti-abortion” laws in recent history. Alabama’s abortion laws effectively ban abortion including in cases of rape and incest. As expected, the passing of these laws has caused a stir. The “Pro-Life” camp is celebrating the victory and the “Pro-Choice” is bemoaning how far we’ve regressed.

This story makes my eyes roll and I develop, what my mother calls, a “Smug” Singaporean mindset, thinking that I am bloody lucky that I live in Singapore, a country where “common sense” rules the day.

 For all that is said of the man, our Founding Father, Lee Kuan Yew was a man filled with common sense and an uncanny ability to make intelligent decisions. The old man understood that crucial decisions were not much a question of a choice between good and evil but a question of choosing between the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods. It’s a point that you often want to slam down the throats of the sanctimonious, particularly on the side of Trump Supporters claiming to be Christians.

Speaking as a man who sent his partner to an abortion table, I believe that abortion laws need to be based on the understanding that this isn’t a choice of good or evil but a choice of the greater good/lesser evil. If we can understand it from this perspective, we can get the extreme emotions out of the topic and create something that is in the best interest of as many of the parties involved.

Let’s start with the obvious. Abortion is a nasty business; however, you slice and dice the scientific process. It does involve the destruction of life in as much as it does involve the formation of cells coming together to create a life. Hence, the morality of abortion laws essentially evolves around when does life begin and you are effectively not allowed to have an abortion after a certain stage into a pregnancy because the “said cells” have really became a life form.

Abortion, as they say, should never be a method of birth control and I guess you could say that I was “punished” for sending Gina onto the abortion table, because I was too carried away with having a woman willing to give me sex on demand to forget that there were consequences to having unprotected sex.

However, as I look back at that fatal decision and to the other decision of entering my two-year marriage with Gina, the decision to abort the child looks like the right one. Although “What if” questions will always be at the back of mind when I look back at my relationship with Gina, the decision not to go through the pregnancy with her was the right one. We were fundamentally unsuited to be together and her demands on me were such that it was virtually impossible for me to make a living (so much so that one of my former bosses biggest pieces of career advice was “you better have a chat with her about showing up at the office) and my parents described it as a question of when we’d murder each other (Mum’s version being you’ll punch her to death and kill yourself). Her parents, who were initially for the relationship would have wised up and realized that we were not good for each other.

You can call me a cynic or selfish but it is clear from the marriage that we had that the greater evil would have been to expose a child to parents who would be detrimental to its well-being. While I’ve not been wildly successful, I’ve managed to do things I’m proud of since I left Gina without the responsibility of a child and Gina, the last time I checked, has done OK for herself. We didn’t expose those cells to a nasty custody battle or the violence that took place in our marriage.

Then, there’s the practical side of things. As my former English teacher (Mrs. Clark), said, “I’m against it in principle but banning it is going to kill off women who will seek the help of quacks in dubious back alleys.” History has shown that just as anti-abortion laws have been around, women have gone to quacks to deal with unwanted pregnancies. 

I often like to refer to Lee Kuan Yew’s thoughts on prostitution when it comes to abortion. Better to have it legal and controlled rather than to have it driven underground and managed by the nasty element.

Lee Kuan Yew would have been good for addressing the abortion issue in America. Unfortunately, Lee Kuan Yew’s successors seem to have lost his common sense touch on a few things. The two most common instances where I believe that the Singapore Government has lost the plot are in the cases of smoking and homosexual sex.

I look at the debate on smoking and “alternative” tobacco products and cringe. The government is actually sounding increasingly impotently-sanctimonious on the topic. Despite and increasing number of bodies like the Royal College of Surgeons in the UK coming out to state that “alternative products” have a use in combating the smoking habit, the government remains adamant that it needs to ban such products in a “preemptive move” to stop people from taking up the habit. In the meantime, normal cigarettes, which everyone agrees are worse than the alternative, remain readily available.

 I guess you could say the desire is to look tough, but I do believe there comes a point when you actually end up looking silly by sticking to a position despite growing evidence that your position is factually weak – America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently allowed the sale of IQOS, a heated and not burn tobacco system by Philip Morris, which has shown that there’s a way to make what everyone agrees is a lesser evil work.

If the government’s stance on alternative tobacco products looks silly, the stance on consensual sex is downright stupid. The emotion of the debate has been such that the government has stuck to its position of “Keeping the law but not enforcing it.” This is clearly not something you’d expect from a government that makes “upholding the rule of law” as part of its DNA and as one lawyer said – “what’s the point of having a law if you don’t intend to enforce it.” As I’ve often said, those who support this particular section of the penal code have yet to come up with a sound, rational argument as to why we need to keep this law.

Lee Kuan Yew wasn’t perfect but I don’t think he’s been right on every issue.  However, he understood his role as a leader and made decisions that did benefit the greater good or the lesser evil. When I look at some of these debates in the world, I miss him and the pragmatic wisdom that he displayed.