A Pregnant African Woman

Medical practitioners should not allow sectarian groups including religious, certain human rights bodies and politicians to deceivingly re-define abortion. In fact, even under medical emergencies some pro-life proponents still equate abortion to murder.Due to our societal limitations we have reified, rather than verified, the whole abortion debate on partisan prisms.

Abortion is neither a superfluous issue like the weather nor a means of dehumanising modern human beings.Camouflaging constitutional, political and spiritual challenges with medical and women’s rights is self-defeating. We need not sanctify political legislation and the constitution by basing our societal justifications while misplacing women’s immediate human rights.

We do not discover moral stands but only create them by the stand we take. Thus we should not be seen to infringe upon women rights for the worth of our existence emerges out of what we choose to stand for, first as individuals.Women should be given a chance to respond to life challenges by being responsive and responsible.

Whether one is a pro-life gynecologist or otherwise there are no absolutes except those that we help create but without partisan interests and discriminating against other groups.

Personally, I support FIDA and the Coalition on Violence Against Women for pushing for the proposed draft of the Reproductive Health and Rights Bill of 2008.

As we tackle the challenges of Safe Motherhood (Part II of the Bill), we need to acknowledge that abortion seems to be some ‘obsolete taboo’ because it now appears unstructured and undefined to suit interests of all groups. For women, abortion could be a medical and human right holism that is essential to their health.

Society ought to be beyond good and evil by not being frustrated but be fascinated by what seems inevitable.Faith, politics and varied discrimination alone would never solve all human challenges. Selective alienation is the syndrome of our discriminative societal belief systems at the expense of individual rights.

The abortion’s ‘rescue-victim-persecutor’ triangle ‘intoxicates’ our mirror-hungry society. Abortion should not be condoned to its entirety but certain defined and evaluated circumstances such as rape, incest, severe deformity of the unborn, among others, ought to be critically analyzed.

Certainly, it is better to be informed than to be converted, to make life bearable. Some analyst, Harris, symbolically stated that, ‘people are born frogs until they transform themselves into princes and princesses’. Should we continue living in deceit as our women live in dehumanizing conditions?

Mundia Mundia Jnr. 
Clinical Psychiatrist