Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgKB_Z8p-DI
I am Catholic, and the truth is, I am decidedly so. I went through that phase of questioning the belief system I was born into. But I ended up still believing. However, it is also because I am Catholic that I am more flexible in my beliefs. People will be surprised but other Christian sects are less compromising. I won’t be excommunicated just because I believe that contraception is okay.
That said, abortion was still something I could not even fathom accepting. What is more un-Christian than killing a helpless baby? But if anybody asked me if I was for or against it, I would probably have said, “I don’t know yet.” I wanted to fight for women’s rights but there was a bitter taste to having to give up a life for a “choice”.
After watching the documentary Agaw Buhay however, I was forced to make up my mind. I saw women who, actually, had no choice. Perhaps because I was young and never had to deal with the magnitude of problems that they have had, I always thought that women who went through abortions were simply dodging the consequences of their actions. They were faceless in my head. Aside from those who were raped, those women could have prevented getting pregnant.
And so the documentary was indeed an eye-opener. When you hear about actual cases of women who decided they needed an abortion, you realize that they are no monsters. In the documentary, those who got raped had no choice. Those who didn’t, at the moment of their decision, essentially had no choice either. The mindset I was initially coming from got revealed to me. Why are we automatically blaming someone for getting pregnant?
While discussing the documentary in class, I’ve actually heard a classmate making the same comments I used to have. “Why do they enjoy unprotected sex then make the innocent child suffer?” I had the same convictions. It was good that the blame was not on the woman only. But I had to stop and think. Whether or not these people made “mistakes”, why are we putting them in a situation where they are bound to make more?
In fact, why are we subjecting a child—or a future one, to a kind of life it may not want to have? Oh sure, we can force the mother to go through a pregnancy for 9 months then she can just have the kid adopted, right? But does the kid want to become adopted? Is society going to be responsible for the kind of life the child will go through? Even if it wants to, it can’t.
Watching the interviews in the documentary, I realized that I was looking at abortion from a privileged position. The woman deciding to abort a pregnancy was in an excruciatingly difficult position. I have enough kids to feed. My husband left me. I have to carry this child for 9 months and it will interrupt not only my life but also the life of everyone I am responsible for. If I die, what is next? I can imagine the questions but never the difficulty of being the one that has to answer these. I am not them. And so why do I have to decide for them?
Neither am I God. I cannot judge them.
Of course we can counsel. It is important because the decision is irreversible. But not providing the space to even talk about wanting an abortion is dodging the real problem at hand. While we continue to see that abortion is abhorrent, no one will come for help. No one will offer help.
During the discussions, I probably shocked some classmates when I answered the question, “In what instances will you allow abortion?” and I said, “probably in all cases”. Although I did mention that aborting a pregnancy after a certain number of weeks might be cruel because the child already feels its death, if detected early, a woman should be able to decide for herself whether to go through the pregnancy or not. Forcing a woman to go through the 9-month pregnancy is risking a woman’s life against her own will. Doesn’t that sound a little like rape, too? Going back to being Christian, isn’t this also un-Christian?
The lines that struck me the most was the one that Dr. Junice Melgar of Likhaan said about the mother who died because the doctors would not decide whether to abort her pregnancy even when her body cannot have it. Her children lost their mother. She said, “I can’t even fathom why people would have ambivalence over a full life. You see it was between a full life…she was caring for those children. That was how valuable that life was.”
Some may think, well that’s a pretty economic way to look at it. There’s a hierarchy of value between the lives of the mother and the unborn. Yet placing an unequal value in their lives is the very nature of a pregnancy that a woman is not prepared to undergo. Aborting puts more value on the woman’s life. Not aborting puts more value on the unborn. Isn’t it hypocritical to say then that you are pro-life if you only care about the fetus?
Who will fight for the fetus, one may ask. Between woman and fetus, the fetus is more vulnerable. But how does that figure? You don’t know what can happen in 9 months. As has happened, the pregnant woman can also die. Her other children can also die or live a life less full.
In the end the realization is that probably most women who go through abortion, especially in the Philippines where it is illegal, had to muster enough courage to do it. Once they have done it, what do we achieve by being accusatory? What do we achieve by letting them bleed to death?
Maybe it is a good experiment to imagine yourself being in their shoes. The righteous you would say you would never have done it. But that’s because the righteous you is limited by what you can imagine. You can never be in their shoes. We will never know what we could have done if we were living their lives because we are never going to live as them. Hence there is only one thing we can give them—compassion.
