What about your Christian duty?

THE EDITOR: Ms Suzanne Sheppard is unable to find any validity whatsoever in ASPIRE’s call for making abortion legal. Let me try to make a few observations that may put her at ease. Making abortion more broadly legal does not compel a single woman to have an abortion.  We are advocates of choice, not compulsion.  Faithful Catholics should feel no threat whatsoever by widely legal abortion. Keeping abortion legal but restrictive fails to prevent up to four thousand unsafe abortions each year.  These poor women end up in our public hospitals and constitute one of our major public health challenges. Ms Sheppard describes ASPIRE as “pro-abortion.”  We provide contraceptive information and promote contraceptive use.   We promote wanted pregnancies.  It is those religious institutions that rile against modern contraceptives that can properly be described as “pro-abortion.”

It is those religious institutions that rile against the use of condoms that can properly be charged with prompting a “culture of death.” We have no qualms about Dr Bernard Nathanson.  We respect his choice to change his view — just as we hold that all women must be free to make their own choices.   It is unfortunate that he generated false data.  That does not help any cause.  But our concern is about the data here in our country — about the plight of poor women who suffer unnecessary harm. We prefer women avoid the need for recourse to abortion.  But if they have that need, we want them to have access to safe services — just like rich women in our society. The data on the alleged correlation between breast cancer and pregnancy is at best inconclusive.  Recent studies have stated definitively that there is no link.  But some are intent on a course of making abortion as awful and as terrifying as possible.  Ms Sheppard offers a long list of complications of abortion. 

So are we to imagine that if the law of abortion remains as it is, legal but restricted, and poor women continue to rely on traditional and backstreet providers, this is somehow better for them? As a matter of interest, the danger from abortion is several hundred times greater when provided by a backstreet agent than when a trained professional performs the procedure in a health facility. What sort of perverse logic prevents Ms Sheppard from seeing the obvious public health need to make abortion legal?  What of her Christian duty to offer compassion to one’s neighbour?  I found none in her deadly denial of our wretched reality that leaves poor women vulnerable.

KARIMA McKENZIE THOMAS
Port-of-Spain