The Abortion Child’s Dilemma

Nov 01, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists

By Dennis Nichols

Five year-old Lina Medina (in 1939) cradling her newborn

The human experience! Snap your thumb and middle finger together very rapidly. Every snap instantaneously represents a new birth somewhere on Earth. Stop! Snap them a bit slower but still rapidly. For each, someone somewhere has drawn his or her last breath. Now factor in all living things on the planet in a continuous cycle of life and death, and it’s easy to see why some people say Earth is a gigantic living, breathing (and dying) organism.

Life is both matter-of-factly cheap, and profoundly precious. Abortion is a word with an ugly connotation and where human beings are concerned, it’s often just plain murder. But for many women, and the men who support them, it’s a life-saver, and therein lies a dilemma for people like me and others who feel compelled to look at both sides of the issue. It’s the drawing of a line where murder is seemingly justified on one side, and the sanctity of life upheld on the other.

Human beings dream. Women are human beings; therefore women dream. This simple syllogism helps support a widely held idea that most women dream of experiencing two distinct rites of passage – becoming a wife, and becoming a mother. Some feminists and career women may not agree as to the reality or the strength of this ‘biological urge’ especially with respect to motherhood, but experts claim it exists, and always will.

Before motherhood however, comes pregnancy, and it is there that the dream can turn into a nightmare. Fear, apprehension, illness and doubting her ability to carry, deliver, and care for a new life, can be debilitating to a woman. These and a dozen other factors may influence her and/or her doctor to bring the process to a screaming halt. Abortion saves the day and often the woman’s life. But it also kills a dream, and destroys an innocent and vulnerable human being.

Several years ago my own (general) anti-abortion stance was solidified to some extent after a female friend graphically related her self-help abortion to me. She had drunk some concoction and had passed out a living foetus in a washroom. There was a brief tone of sadness in her voice as she remembered how visibly human it’s form was. Then with self-conscious laughter she admitted, “I jus’ flush he down de toilet.” I remember passing off momentary revulsion as manly indifference, but it struck me.

The mechanics of the human body are amazing; seemingly beyond full human comprehension. The interplay has intrigued, mystified and humbled the greatest medical and scientific minds for centuries. Arguably no aspect of it is as fascinating as the reproductive process in the making of a new life during which, in addition to medicine and science, ethics and morality converge to present us with a unique conundrum as to the exact moment when life commences. (It allows some people to think the ‘morning after’ pill is actually abortive.) This in turn is associated with the definition of life itself in the womb and the question of what rights, if any, a developing embryo or foetus has.

The pros and cons of the A word are heatedly and perennially debated, and most of us probably have a fair understanding of the positions taken by both the pro-choice and the pro-life advocates. I have tended to side with the latter but because I also tend to not see most issues in black and white, I am open to the contentions of the former. Today, for those readers not acquainted with the following ‘child’ related cases, I will, in layman fashion, briefly open for exploration the dilemma and the options faced on both sides of an issue that has strong health, ethical, religious and spiritual underpinnings, with reference to a couple of them. (The situation in Guyana will not be looked at; it deserves a story of its own.)

How many of us are aware of a certain ‘world record’ held by a Peruvian woman when she was a five year-old girl in 1939? In a documented and highly-publicized case in the Peruvian district of Ticrapo, Lina Medina gave birth to a six-pound baby boy, and in the process became the world’s youngest ever mother at the age of five years, seven months. (She had reportedly experienced very early puberty and had fully-mature sexual organs.) Reports suggest that Lina is still alive although her son died in 1979 at the age of 40. To this day, it is reported, no one knows who the father of the child is, although her own father was held on suspicion of child sexual abuse but later released due to insufficient evidence.

Had such a thing come to light in this day and age, imagine the controversy it would have ignited. Pro-lifers would no doubt have used it to validate their position that all life is sacred, and that regardless of the prevailing circumstances, a pregnancy once started, should be allowed its natural progression to the logical conclusion. The pro-choice crowd would almost certainly have rallied around the child and sought to enforce her right to be protected as a child from the horrendous physical and psychological consequences of rape including the very real possibility of unbearable pain, (focused around her still developing pelvis) delivery trauma, and death. Years later, I assume, the pro-lifers would feel vindicated by the relatively uncomplicated lives mother and child subsequently lived.

In Paraguay where abortion is illegal except when the mother’s life is threatened, a 10 year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather, has been denied the procedure by government authorities despite her mother’s pleas and an international outcry. The authorities do not want to circumvent the Catholic country’s strict anti-abortion laws, and in fact imprisoned the mother after accusing her of ‘failing in her duty of care’ despite a complaint to the police a year earlier that her husband was sexually abusing her daughter.

A judge was further considering charging her with being an accomplice in the rape. The girl is in a shelter and the rapist is on the run. Enraged human rights groups and activists believed the child would face health and psychological risks because of her age and the circumstances that led to the pregnancy. (An update states that the girl gave birth to a six-pound baby girl in August.)

And in Brazil in 2009, a Catholic family was excommunicated by the Vatican following an abortion performed on a nine year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather and was carrying twins. It also excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure. A Brazilian archbishop said, “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored.”

In each of these cases, very young children were raped and impregnated; in two instances the pregnancies were taken to full term with no serious complications. In the other the child and her family were evidently traumatized. Where is the right and the wrong in all of this?

I have my convictions, but I am sympathetic to what these three innocent girls were put through and to the arena of circumstances surrounding each ‘combatant’. It’s a sobering fact that thousands of pre-teen girls worldwide (including Guyana of course) are sexually active. In many instances pregnancies and abortions are inescapable.

So, many people see abortion as a horrific sin. Some Christians especially, feel that their heavenly father will hold them fully accountable for this ‘slaughter of innocents’ and deal with them condignly in the afterlife unless genuine repentance is expressed and forgiveness sought in fervent prayer. Even so they feel that its unsavory consequences will haunt them for the rest of their temporal lives.

Many young women who have had abortions clearly feel great remorse afterward. Some turn to God seeking forgiveness for what they consider an almost unforgiveable act. It would be in most people’s opinion, a very harsh deity who would turn His back on such a supplicant, and add to her remorse the awful sentence of everlasting punishment in hell. No ‘abortion child’ deserves that.