Ma’am,
I read comments in a section of the press attributed to you on the issue of abortion. Since I did not see a distancing or retraction of the comments, I assume the media categorized your thoughts correctly. Consequently, I wanted to use this forum to share a few thoughts of my own with you.
The first thing I wondered about is how you would ever have a way of knowing how many abortions are conducted on a daily basis in Barbados. While the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act in Barbados makes provision for the Minister to provide provisions for records of abortions to be kept, I am completely unaware of this being done, specifically in private doctors’ offices on the island.
In the absence of data collection, how did you come to know how many abortions were being done on the island and whether that number was in fact enough to contribute to declining population levels? Also, I wondered if your daily average of abortions included only induced abortions or spontaneous abortion.
Spontaneous abortion, more commonly called miscarriage, sometimes occurs undetected to even the woman carrying the pregnancy. It is a completely natural process and requires no reporting at all. Thus, I wondered how you accounted for spontaneous abortion in tallying the daily rate of abortions in Barbados.
You asserted that abortions were responsible for the decline of population in Barbados as an unchallengeable fact. I wondered where the comparative data for that very bold statement came from. How far back in Barbados’ history did you go? The reality is that women throughout the history of Barbados and the Commonwealth Caribbean have used herbs and poultices to have abortions.
There have been, at some points of history, more crude methods of inducing abortions. We will never know what the rate of abortion was at any historical point before the passage of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act in 1983 – and as I noted above, even then we have not done a stellar job of data collection. If we do not know whether our historical levels of population were without abortions counted, there is no basis to compare now to then.
Moreover, there is another very significant measure which, as far as I know, has never been calculated for Barbados and without which you cannot convincingly link abortion rates to population decline. Barbados has no measures related to fecundity rates or monitors of it over time. The more serious problem may not be that women who end up with an unwanted pregnancy opt to get rid of it, but that women who want to have children cannot conceive.
Barbados, over the years, has remained high on the list of countries whose population is significantly affected by non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Many of these NCDs have an impact on a person’s fertility.
In many cases, medicines taken for NCDs come with a warning about not conceiving or high levels of risk for complication in pregnancy. I think there can be an easier case made for our levels of NCDs to be the cause of declining population rates than the abortion rate.
You listed three reasons for women wanting to have abortions. All three of the reasons were external to the woman’s own agency of choice. I accept your charge that some women have abortions because their partners do not want the pregnancy. I also accept that some women have abortions because of the financial burden of caring for pregnancy and then subsequently a child.
In the case where a mother makes a financial decision to terminate a pregnancy, I wonder what can be the real benefit of a charity supporting her through changing her mind. I wonder what the scope and magnitude of that type of help looks like. I wonder because due to the systematic oppression of women and many of them in Barbados never managing to move beyond working class, the decision to bring a pregnancy to term for such a woman is not a nine-month one but a lifetime one.
What do we want? Just numbers for increasing the population? Or a healthy, happy population that can be productive and contribute to the growth of Barbados? If we want the former, we can invest in talking women out of abortions, but the latter involves a lot more social planning to ensure that women who choose motherhood can do so safely and in a way that produces well balanced citizens.
You note that some women have abortions because their parents force them to. I think this is an especially egregious reason for a termination of pregnancy, and I agree that we should minimize the possibility for this kind of coercion. Thus, I am anxious to hear what work your charity is doing to ensure that the age of medical consent is brought in line with the age of sexual consent. This will ensure that a woman seen as mature enough to consent to sex can also then be left responsible to decide what medical course she wishes to take with a pregnancy.
I am alarmed and disappointed though, that as a woman who has made a choice to fight for what you believe in – pro-life – that you did not acknowledge in your article that other women have that same right. Many women have abortions because they choose to.
They fall pregnant in whatever circumstance and opt not to carry through the pregnancy. I feel as though any movement that seeks to take that choice away is retrograde and patriarchal. I too see myself as a pro-lifer. I am pro the life of the woman who has to subject her body to a pregnancy and then figure out the next 18 years of moulding a life.
Wouldn’t you agree it is complicated?
Marsha Hinds is the President of the National Organisation of Women.
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An Open Letter to Marsha Hinds
22nd February 2020
Ma’am, it seemed inappropriate to me for it to remain unrebutted, the grotesque moral premises and obfuscation of the simple facts contained in your open letter to the Kamille Martindale of Unborn Justice, published 21st February, 2020.
Do we really need “comparative data” to surmise as an evident fact that in the context of legality, modern medicine and social destigmatization (by persons such as yourself), of abortion, that it would have increased many times over in comparison to past years when such a context did not exist? Really?
Would you likewise argue that we need “comparative data” to assert that mortality birth rates would have dropped within the context of modern medicine? Or that vehicular deaths would have reduced with the invention of seatbelts? No serious-minded person would.
So yes, it’s safe to assert as fact that an increase in the number of people killed while in the womb de facto means a decrease in the number of people living outside of the womb. This is common sense.
But the more alarming aspect of your letter is the sheer intellectual dishonesty when talking about what abortion actually is. Stunning really.
A miscarriage is not an abortion. To be clear, in both a miscarriage and an abortion the human child in the womb dies but the difference in the paths towards that tragic end is night and day.
Miscarriages, by definition, are unintentional. The mother or anyone else does not seek the end of the life of the preborn child but that life ends regardless for a whole host of reasons.
Abortion is the intentional premeditative killing of a pre-born child. (i.e. before the child has exited the woman’s body, that child has his or her life ended by a medical or non-medical procedure).
Both are tragic but one has no moral implication for the mother, while the other has a moral implication for the mother and anyone else, who supports her in the intentional, premeditative killing of her preborn child.
Abortion is not the killing of an organ or tissue or part of the woman’s body. Abortion is the killing of the distinct human life, that is inside the body of his or her mother for the first 9 months of their life.
This is precisely why abortion is, morally speaking, murder. A lot more, but nothing less.
Being pro-life means that you are AGAINST the idea that women, doctors or anyone else should have the CHOICE over whether to murder their preborn child.
To say you are “pro-life of the woman who has to subject her body to a pregnancy,” while advocating for her legal right to murder her own child is not pro-life at all. It’s pro-death.
You should stick to the labels that people of your ilk ascribe to themselves. You are pro-choice. You are pro the choice of a woman to murder her preborn child.
Pro-choice (for women) = Pro-death (for their children). It isn’t complicated at all.
Unborn Justice comes into the fray and offers women, as an alternative to murdering their own preborn children, a support line to take care of those children. This is a righteous endeavor, especially within an evil and wicked society that tells women it’s OK to murder their preborn children if they think it may be too much of a burden when it exits their body. What an evil ideology. Staggers the mind when you think critically about it.
To be sure, being pro-life has nothing to do with the life of those children after they are born even though such interests are righteous and commendable. Being pro-life is simply about protecting the life of the pre-born by saying and propagating the idea that women, doctors, men, aliens, or whoever should not have the right to murder the preborn who are in every way human while they are in the womb, just like every one of us who are outside the womb.
This is not patriarchal. This is simply moral.