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.
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, 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 about the existence of contraception are 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.
Let’s start with the fact that many of us who don’t live in paradise and 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 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, and unwanted pregnancies 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 per cent of abortion patients lived below the federal poverty line.
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
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.
As with much of what comes out of America, the reactions were instantaneous and predictable. Conservatives and evangelicals proclaimed victory, while liberals decried the rolling back of basic rights. As this is America, the world’s only hyperpower, the rest of us can only watch what happens and decide how we go from there.
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.
A version of this article first appeared at beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com