Bible-based laws in multi-religious society?

THE EDITOR: Christopher and Curlene Toppin’s appeal that we should not adopt foreign values and “discard life” (Newsday, July 28) is a remarkable confusion of reality with hope. They put more faith in what is written in our archaic, foreign-inherited law than what happens daily in our hospitals.  They turn away from the abortions that are occurring around them and uphold a law that does nothing to protect maternal or foetal life.  But even worse than their disconnection from the social reality around them is their disquieting claim, in a multi-religious society, for laws to be based on the Bible.

“Laws do not always reflect values unless they are Biblically based.  If we do not have an overall absolute law that governs our actions as a society, then these laws will be subject to the whims and fancies of the judge of the day.” It gets worse.  Whatever values they do not believe in are discarded as being foreign and whichever ones they like are somehow nationalised.  So the Privy Council is ‘foreign’ but “Judeo-Christian Biblical values” are somehow indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago!  And presumably they apply to everyone in the nation, Christians, Muslims and Hindus alike. Apart from this peculiarly warped view of what is ‘foreign’ they also add a string of gross factual errors. 

They claim that abortion laws  “protect the values of the rich minority ... at the expense of the disenfranchised majority, that is, the rich can afford to have babies but encourage the poor and the ignorant to kill theirs.” There are so many crude untruths in this statement.  First and foremost no one seeks to ‘encourage’ any woman to abort her pregnancy.  We want a law that gives any woman who wants to end a pregnancy, access to safe services. Second, the rich have no need to change the criminal abortion law because they have access to safe, private medical services, whether in this country or in another.

Third, it is precisely the poor who stand to benefit most from legal abortion: it is they and only they who are the victims of unsafe abortions and who end up in our public hospitals day after day.  It is this disenfranchised, poor majority that we aim to enfranchise. Fourth, as anyone with eyes knows, rich people as a whole have far fewer children than poor people.  And rich, married women generally have a higher abortion rate than poor, single women.

KARIMA MCKENZIE-THOMAS