Abortion vs The Right To Life

I’m always visited by a deep sense of grateful sadness whenever my daughter’s birthday approaches. I remember the day her mom told me she was pregnant. She was a university student, and I was still under the depression shadow, not knowing what I wanted to do with, or if I wanted, my life. She thought abortion would be a better solution. I nearly agreed. We came into an agreement that if she carried the child to term, nurture and gave birth to until she was ready for weaning, I’d take care of it on my own.

I’m eternally grateful that she agreed to my terms since she too was wholly willing to terminate the pregnancy. My daughter has been living with me since she was about nine months. She spends her school holidays with her mom and half-sisters in Port Elizabeth.

I’m saying all this because I’m rather intrigued by the high statistics of abortion in our country, and irritated by its promulgators who seem to regard it as just one of the imperatives of democratic progress and enlightenment. One of my reasons for deciding to become a writer was as an attempt at defending the quality of human life.

I might use my culture or religious belief as my reasoning why I think abortion is wrong but I choose not to partly because most of the people in my immediate circles are agnostic, verging on atheism. They like using social and democratic freedom in arguing for a woman’s right to abortion. I believe in a woman’s right to do whatever they wish with their bodies so long as that right does not infringe on other’s rights.

The argument that abortion reduces the number of unfit parents, or addresses the problem of poverty is bunkum. Bad parents are not made by children they bare, neither are most abortionists poor. The idea of framing the right to abortion in social garb has a blackmailing tendency, as if you don’t support a woman’s right to abortion you are infringing on their sacrosanct Human Rights. As much as I believe in individual rights of freedom I also believe the right to life is the principal right of them all.

I believe the use of arguments about when does life actually begin—I believe at conception—are mostly disingenuous technical evasions that are not suasive and encourage moral bankruptcy. I’m Roman Catholic by faith, and try never to forget that Catholicism implies universalism—the beauty of the open mind and solidarity.

I believe that children should be planned. Planned children have a better chance in life. But I’ve come to believe that there can be no moral consensus between those who believe that the destruction of human life in the womb is wrong, and those who believe it is not. It may be possible to establish a pragmatic consensus among those who are prepared to discuss which abortions are less wrong than others. But attempts to establish foundations for a broader moral consensus always degenerate into glibness.

I’m of the opinion that each of us must be answerable to our own conscience and conviction. It is part of what makes us human. To take away our responsibility for our moral decisions is to take away our humanity. This implies that we must allow people to make their own decisions, even those we believe are wrong; because it would be more wrong for us to deny them the capacity to do that. Whether concerning politics or religion, it’s becoming clearer that our age is fraught with intolerant fundamentalists. Tolerance is the price we must pay for our democratic adventure of liberty.

I assume that even those who believe that abortion is ‘a right’ understand that women do not exercise that right in the same way they exercise their right to vote. I acknowledge that access to abortion can be a social good, while in the same breath believing that it’s in bad consciousness for woman to have an abortion. In the end, whatever the socio-political-religious meaning of abortion for an individual woman, abortion is essentially a private solution to an individual situation.

The morality of abortion cannot be resolved in the abstract. Each individual abortion takes place within its own complex set of circumstances. To understand abortion we need to understand its place in women’s lives. Those who defend the right to abortion win the argument, as far as I am concerned, only when they appeal to a sense of tolerance. To defend a life of an unborn child too, I believe that we must first win the conscience of individual women towards the sentiments and values of sanctity of every life.

There are no short-cuts to both these stands except proper instalment of rights and values. The sadder scenario is the mother who opts for one option due to ignorance, and then regrets her decision later on.

The effort of toleration involved in suffering the expression of an opinion one knows to be false is indispensable to liberty in a free society. Respecting a person’s right to be wrong is a grave requirement in a free society. It’s what the friends of Voltaire promulgated as one of his saying, i.e. that of defending another person’s right to be wrong with your life if need be. Respecting a person’s right to be wrong is a transforming imperative of free societies, especially those where religious values have lost their hold.