I HAVE this friend from Davao who is a medicine student. We would text every now and then about nothing in particular, but there was one time when she caught me reading a book by an abortionist turned pro-life advocate. I asked her if she was for abortion and, surprisingly, she said she was. It quickly turned into a heated debate, as I am personally against abortion.
I remember this now that several women lawmakers are pushing for the passing of the new bill on reproductive health care, which is interpreted by the pro-life camp as opening the doors for abortion, since it aims to loosen the legal restrictions on women’s access to reproductive health services.
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What is it with abortion, anyway? Some people want it, and some don’t, and both camps have reasons. We who witness the debate are compelled to discern on the reasons from both sides and see which of them is more tenable, and therefore should be accepted and applied.
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In the introductory note, the bill sees laws prohibitive of abortion as discriminatory with regards to women’s right of choice. But in loosening the legal restrictions, the bill is courting ethical disaster. Leaving the choice to women and teenagers is practically the same as giving the knife with which to cut their bellies open. And that is, I would say, the most perverted sort of values I have ever come across.
What’s more, the argument that abortion can be a recourse open for couples who choose not to have children yet is a case of barking up the wrong tree, since there are preventive measures for a woman not to conceive. Why abort a child already growing in the womb? It is transgressing the woman’s right of choice, they say.
But was it the child’s choice to be conceived? The parents have full knowledge that the sexual act can lead to conception despite the measures undertaken, as these are not proven to be 100 percent effective. Hence, who transgressed whose rights? Let the child grow, I say; let it be born, and then let it choose whether to be a transgressor of rights or not.
The “lump of flesh” in the womb is life itself. It is a life not identical to that of the mother nor that of the father. It is another human being propelled into growth as is inherent in its nature, though with the help of the mother’s body. One should be awed by this phenomenon, and in reverent awe (if not love) the lump should be nurtured and not aborted.
And finally, a woman’s body was made to carry a child. I wonder why pro-abortion women, in believing that abortion should be left to their choice because it is their body which is affected, choose to reject this natural function, and themselves in the process.
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It’s funny how the proposed bill has made me go into overdrive. But we already have abortion laws, and abortion is justified in extreme cases, such as in an ectopic pregnancy. The new bill as a whole is vague, and its vagueness is what makes it dangerous.
Some lines, though, are clear enough. In the explanatory note, you find this: “Denying a woman the option of avoiding pregnancy or under exceptional instances carrying a fetus to full term interferes with her right to decide on a matter that has tremendous impact on her body and her personal liberty.”
If there is something that has to be aborted, it is the campaign to have abortion legalized. Call me conservative. But if arguing that life should be preserved is conservative, I can’t imagine the stand of those who call themselves liberal.
