Responding to social reality

THE EDITOR: ASPIRE promotes safe motherhood. If one follows Ms Leela Ramdeen’s challenges to ASPIRE, one would imagine that we are stalking health centres, doctors’ offices and hospitals in search of pregnant women and giving them pamphlets urging them to have abortions! What an amazing perspective — this notion that we are ‘promoting abortion.’ ASPIRE is doing nothing of the sort.  We are responding to the fact that women are having abortions.  We are seeing that thousands of poor women enter our public hospitals suffering from complications of unsafe abortions. We have observed that the criminal law is the major cause of this particular problem. 

We are therefore promoting a public debate with a view to persuading our government to make abortion legal and end the injustice poor women endure day after day and year after year. We are responding to a social reality that has been denied for far too long.  We are promoting justice. We are promoting fairness.  We are promoting the dignity of all women, but especially poor women. We regret that Ms Ramdeen, Chair CCSJ, feels attacked personally. We have no wish to attack any person.  Our interest is to attack the unfairness that poor women suffer because of an archaic law. Our goal is to contribute to the realization of safe motherhood for all women.

GLENNIS
HYACENTH
ASPIRE