Criminal conspiracy on abortion

THE EDITOR: In July 2000, a young woman died of an unsafe abortion in the Scarborough Hospital. Since then our Government has spent tax dollars on police investigations and court inquests. A fifth session was held recently. The problem of unsafe abortion is not an issue of punishing this or that back street provider. The issue is a law and that causes a widespread public health problem for poor women and a social system that denies this cruel reality. Wasting taxpayers’ dollars to prosecute back street providers is a non-starter. It does not prevent thousands of unsafe abortions and it certainly does nothing to prevent the many more thousands of abortions taking place in private medical practitioners’ offices. 

What is criminal is the conspiracy of our entire social system in its denial of this urgent public health problem. The criminal is each person — man or woman — who has secretly sought the services of any provider, doctor, pharmacist or back street provider over the last 50 years for which we have data. These persons don’t “promote abortion.”   They respond, often reluctantly, to couples’ desperate calls for help. The rumour is that the back street provider suspected in the death in Tobago has been a provider for nearly half a century.  So who is the criminal?  Who has connived to keep this public secret so well protected?  And who has not been a part of this criminal silence? And that should be her defence.  She should simply name every person of every class, every profession, every religion, and every race, who has sought her services. 

That is perhaps the way to expose the vulgar hypocrisy we live decade after decade, blinding our eyes to the reality around us and deadening our conscience to our neighbours who suffer unnecessarily because of an idiotic law. But perhaps we don’t consider them neighbours. They are too poor for us to see ourselves in their pain. We have no sense of injustice or outrage. It is time to end this mockery of our judicial system. It is time to shift from our cloistered denial to public outrage. It is time to end the masquerade and face the wretched injustice of the criminal law of abortion. It is time to end our silence. “The fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.” (Cassius, Julius Caesar). We must modify the criminal law by developing a positive civil law consistent with our oft-stated goal of strengthening maternal health.

GLENNIS HYACENTH
ASPIRE