IT’S ALWAYS A CHOICE

It’s an unanswerable proposition that every woman who elects to abort or not to abort a pregnancy makes a choice.

So I’m intolerant of an abortion debate that’s labelled as pro-life against pro-choice since all are for different choices and none is anti-life. The debate actually rages between those who are pro-abortion and anti-abortion. The USA debate is particularly frustrating. Many Americans are for gun rights because “only bad people (‘thugs’ according to Donuts Maralardo) with guns kill people” yet stridently oppose abortion rights on the hypothesis that abortions not “bad people with access to abortion” kill babies. It’s not surprising in a nation where right wing stupidity has become an art and left wing disrespect common custom.

How come people can’t keep their guns AND their abortion rights? Why must the “good” suffer for the “bad” only where guns are concerned?

On close examination this contradictory propaganda becomes ludicrous. It’s unarguably easier to narrow choices available to “thugs” to publicly obtain high-powered guns than choices available to privately terminate unwanted or dangerous pregnancies.

Pro-choice advocates are equally blinkered because they won’t accept “pro-life” advocates’ premise that abortions “kill babies”.  I’ve found, in my career as a civil law advocate that, if you can accept opponents’ premise then show the fallacy in their subsequent reasoning, that’s the best strategy. Criminal defense lawyers have told me the best defense is to agree as much as possible with the prosecution’s facts then veer off as close to the moment of criminality as you can.

If you are the type of debater that can’t let go, then preconditions “for the sake of argument” or “assuming you are right” are available.

The good news for “pro-life” agitators is I agree every abortion terminates a human life. In my spiritual belief system, conception is the result of a ménage à trois involving mother, father and God whose seminal (take your minds out of the gutter) involvement is to infuse the foetus with a soul. In fact, if Christian fundamentals are to be taken, even just “for the sake of argument”, then the father’s input, apart from helping to decide the baby’s cis-gender, is pretty much as inconsequential as it often is disappointing.

Phillip, my dear,
last night I thought was you in here.
Where did you go?
Working for good old England?
Missing out all di action!

My dear, do you know?
There was a man in mi bedroom
wearing your shoe;
trying on the royal costume;
dipping in the royal perfume.
I telling you true!

Biblical assertion of self-important man’s near irrelevance to the process is apparent in the account of Jesus’ conception. So I begin with Christian dogma, converted by reason into spiritual reality, that every abortion kills a real, viable, human being. It’s an intentional homicide.

But, afterwards, Christian dogma runs amok and arrives at horrendous hypocrisy.  Not every homicide is unjustified or illegal. There’s a legal and moral exception known as justifiable homicide. In law “justifiable homicide” can be defined as the killing of a person in circumstances regarded in law as without criminal guilt. In religious edict it has much wider application including killing gay men who indulge in lovemaking with other gay men (Leviticus 20:13); or adulterers (Leviticus 20:10-11).

So I’ve a hard time stifling a yawn when I see or hear Christian fanatics ranting against vulnerable (some in danger) mothers who decide to “kill their babies.” This self-righteous indignation is expressed regardless of medical opinion as to danger of continuing to birth. These same loud, irrational, patronizing purveyors of propaganda have no problem with killing in self defence; killing in protection of property; killing in war; and, of course, my personal favourite, revenge killing by the State, euphemistically called “the death penalty”.

I’ll Curb my Enthusiasm. Let’s just call them High Larryous!

I’ve always come clean with readers and will do so again. I’m against abortion in any non life threatening circumstance. This is based on my spiritual awareness that the soul is infused at conception so the foetus is always a viable human being that has done no wrong and whose human potential remains unknown. As a result I assure readers I’ll never undergo an abortion. But I won’t impose my personal belief on anyone else nor will I endorse State imposed theocratic laws. So I support a limited legalization of a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. Legislating morality is an exercise in futility. Even in the area of homicide, the law doesn’t try to criminalize all killing. All the law can do is deter and punish unjustified homicide.

Removed from hyped-up fear of killing unborn children, homicide is legally justified, inter alia, by self defense. In real life, self-defense doesn’t only arise upon an imminent threat to life but also where there’s an imminent threat to health (including mental health) that can threaten the life or critical welfare of a pregnant mother.  In war, chemical weapons can be more life threatening than bullets. Psychological warfare, as Lord Haw-Haw proved during World War II, can also be equally deadly. So, I’d adjust abortion laws to decriminalize any abortion performed on medical advice. This leaves the decision up to expecting mothers and their medical consultants or introduces what bridge players know as “the principle of restricted choice”.

Being with this perfect stranger
the jewel was in danger for I was alone
with a man in mi bedroom
loaded with brew.
Yes, this malodorous urchin
on top of mi bed was perching
like a cockatoo!

A man in mi bedroom…
Sorry, dear, I misconstrue
when I took him for you.

Contrary to popular belief, Slinger Francisco (“Mighty Sparrow”) wasn’t born in Trinidad but a Grenadian fishing village named Grand Roy on July 9 1935. His family moved to Trinidad when he was one. He is, for me, the Caribbean’s greatest ever lyricist. He has dominated Trinidadian entertainment awards including eight road march and calypso king titles.

But it’s his lyrical genius for biting satire that sets him apart. Which other songwriter can so smoothly inserts words like “malodorous”
and “necromancy” in their lyrics? In 1982, immediately after Michael Fagan circumvented Buckingham Palace security to enter the Queen’s bedroom where he and she had an extended conversation, Sparrow skillfully lampooned the incident in Philip My Dear.

On September 10, 2022, 87-year-old Sparrow, now (ironically?) living in Queens, was, according to Canadian publication Caribbean Camera, “taken into the water of Holy Baptism by Vincentian Seventh Day Adventist Pastor, Claudius Morgan” himself a former Calypsonian known as “Samaritan Singer”. Sparrow, now “Brother Francisco”, a member of New York’s Linden Seventh Day Adventist Church, vowed to stop singing “some songs”.

Let’s see how long that lasts!

A word of comfort to my religiously fervent friends: Calm down. Your rabid, fear-driven paranoid hallucinations that the Constitutional Reform process threatens your precious anti-abortion or buggery laws are illusions. Can’t happen. Won’t happen! Simply put, these aren’t constitutional issues.

The Constitution contains a fairly aggressive prohibition of same-sex marriage which is somewhat incongruous in a Charter expressly included “for the purpose of affording protection to the rights and freedoms of persons”. But that’s for another day. The Constitution also protects any previously enacted law regarding sexual offences (including buggery) or life of the unborn (abortion) from being struck down for unconstitutionality. Nothing in the Constitution prevents any future parliament from repealing or amending ordinary buggery or anti-abortion legislation by a simple parliamentary majority. So fears that this constitutional reform process might somehow remove religious whack jobs’ right to peek into bedrooms or operating theatres and frank their disapproval of happenings within by criminal sanction are unfounded. They should redirect their righteous ire to MPs.

Reality dictates that, even if, in a future generation, the legal framework I’ve proposed comes to pass, many pregnant women will continue to seek “illegal abortions”; many empathetic doctors, with my spiritual support, will continue to perform them; and the State, if it summons up sufficient sanctimonious strength, can prosecute these “offenders” in the court of Holier-Than-Thou to its heart’s content. That’s because, despite religious loony tunes’ best efforts, the world is what it is and the Universe WILL unfold as it should. Meanwhile, we still live in a world where 76 year old husbands allegedly chop their 72 year old wives to death rather than face embarrassment (financial?) or imagined insult and adult men still allegedly rape and murder nine-year-old girls while Government ignores the nation’s urgent educational reform needs and the Church mounts protests against abortion.

Don’t rabid anti-abortionists realize they might have bigger fish to fry?

Peace and Love

Tags: Abortion rights, birth, Conception, Mighty Sparrow, Philip my Dear