A COURT tussle in Texas, US over the request by a woman with a potentially life-threatening pregnancy to have an abortion highlights the danger of taking any religious prescription to the extreme.
Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, was carrying a 20-week-old foetus that had full trisomy 18, a fatal genetic condition, and doctors said the baby would be stillborn or would live for only days at most. The pregnancy also posed multiple health risks to Cox and her future fertility.
A district judge on Dec 7 issued an emergency order allowing her to terminate the pregnancy but the Supreme Court of Texas met the next day and overruled the order. Texas law prohibits abortion as soon as a heartbeat is detectable, with no exceptions for incest, rape or fetal anomalies.
Sixteen US states have imposed similar near-total bans on ending a pregnancy. In Malaysia, the anti-abortion law is even stricter, as Penal Code Section 312 carries a provision of seven years’ imprisonment for a pregnant woman who causes herself to miscarry.
The religious intention behind these harsh laws is to cherish lives as yet unborn. Buttressing the anti-abortion stance is the religious belief that life begins at conception and, therefore, abortion is an act of killing a human being. As for rape victims, it is argued that the foetus is innocent and, hence, entitled to get born and be loved.
While the correct religious prescription is to stop abortion from being undertaken because the pregnancy is inconvenient or to preserve the mother’s good looks, there is no specific scriptural injunction stating that an unborn fetus is more important than the well-being of a living woman. On the contrary, the Torah implies just the opposite.
A passage in the Book of Exodus stipulates the death penalty if someone hits another and death results. However, if there is a fight in which a pregnant woman is hit so that she miscarries, the aggressor only has to pay some money as compensation.
If the foetus was regarded as a human life on par with an actual living person, the aggressor would have had to be punished with death.
Where there are serious genetic or chromosomal abnormalities, nature itself usually conducts the abortion. As far back as 1975, the world-leading medical journal The Lancet had reported that many pregnancies are naturally terminated before women know they are pregnant and that miscarriage is nature’s main method of quality control.
Fertility specialists and gynaecologists in Malaysia have also written that most women will have between one and two miscarriages in their lifetimes.
For example, Dr Agilan Arjunan wrote in 2016 that miscarriages are mostly “due to genetic problems of the unborn baby. The miscarriage occurs as part of the human body’s ‘quality control’ process.”
Ethnic Chinese women in Malaysia observe the general rule that a woman should inform just the loved ones of her pregnancy during the first trimester, in case there is a miscarriage. Only when she is safely into the second quarter will she announce the happy news to all and sundry.
In 2020, New Scientist weekly reported that for women in their early 20s, 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, while for those in their early 30s, it is 60%, and for those in their early 40s the rate of miscarriage shoots up to 80%.
Embryos with significant chromosomal abnormalities usually do not survive, and miscarriage is nature’s way of giving us healthy children so that humanity as a species can survive. Nature avoids taking extremist positions that harm instead of protecting the species.
Society becomes more violent when an unborn life is treasured more than a living person. Possibly half of all pregnancies in the world are due to rape, seduction or coercion. When victims are forced to suffer another nine months, the prolonged trauma destroys their minds, and children conceived violently are usually born into a life of violence.
In Texas, where all abortions are banned except if it would save a mother’s life, more than 14,000 rapes were reported over one year since the harsh law took effect in 2021.
One in four American college girls endures sexual assault, and a world-renowned television show celebrity has been accused in a Las Vegas court of having raped more than 60 women.
A monkfish culture is endemic throughout the world and the religious domain is no exception. In Bandung, Indonesia, a teacher at a religious boarding school was found guilty last year of raping 13 female students and impregnating at least eight of them.
Last September, a women-only coach was introduced on the Kajang MRT line because of sexual harassment complaints.
However, rapes rarely occur in primitive non-civilized societies where men and women share roles. The Ashanti tribe in Ghana divided leadership between the queen mother and the male chief, and it was a female ruler Nana Yaa Asantewaa who led a rebellion against British colonial rule in 1890.
“If you, the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will,” she told the chiefs. “I shall call upon my fellow women.” Sadly, British troops managed to crush her rebels after several months of fighting.
Gender inequality
Much further back in history, an English queen named Boudicca had two daughters who were raped by Roman soldiers. Enraged, she led the primitive Celtic people in a rebellion against the Romans in 60 CE (Common Era). Before the first battle, she made the clarion call: “This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.” The rebels killed 70,000 Roman soldiers before suffering defeat.
No one should be surprised at the brilliance of women in warfare tactical planning and execution; Throughout nature, it is the female species that fights the fiercest to guard her young.
Gender inequality took hold only with the emergence of civilization, and it was the outcome of the wars of expansion that civilizations waged to expand territorial control.
While the womenfolk such as the Asanti and Celtic warriors were good at defending home ground, men were better at waging war to acquire territory. Men have 10 to 100 times more testosterone than women. This fast-acting, aggressive hormone enables men to embark on wars of conquest.
Three thousand years after the first dawn of civilization, around 5,000 BCE (Before the Common Era), gender inequality had become so deeply embedded in civilized societies that religious founders thereafter had to accept the imbalance or face public rejection.
Women became treated as possessions of men, with no decision-making rights.
Malaysia’s Penal Code Section 498, which the Federal Court on Dec 15 ruled unconstitutional, reflects this notion of women as property. It forbids a man from enticing a married woman away. How about a woman doing the enticing? That is not an offense, as a man is not the possession of this wife.
In matters of sexual assault, the victim’s fate is important only in so far as the rape degrades her and, hence, in many societies, she is usually married off to the rapist to salvage her value. Abortion is not permitted, even for rape, because the woman’s primary role is to produce babies.
Contradictions to religious values
A rarely acknowledged fact is that one powerful rationale to ban abortion throughout civilizational history is to ensure there are enough recruits for the army. The Russian Orthodox Church last November urged authorities to curb abortions because the country is at war and women need to give birth to more soldiers. Do you see the contradiction here to true religious values?
It is often claimed that abortion under any circumstances under-mines family values. However, research over many decades points to the fact that a high percentage of rape or coercion victims who are forced to give birth show no love towards their children, and these children tend to grow up into mentally disturbed adults and criminals.
A United Nations survey conducted across Asia-Pacific in 2013 found that a quarter of the men surveyed had raped a woman or a girl, with the vast majority facing non-legal consequences. Half the men committed their first rape as teenagers.
This situation remains true in Malaysia, with 3,000 unmarried teenage girls getting pregnant last year. Five months ago, OrphanCare Foundation manager Riza Alwi disclosed that babies born out of wedlock often result from rape or unintended pregnancies.
“Discovering their pregnancy under such circumstances is truly traumatic,” she said.
With abortion denied, the obvious result is baby dumping. A total of 256 cases of abandoned babies were recorded from 2020 to 2022. Most of these babies were dumped in rubbish bins, with 70% found lifeless because they were stuffed into toilets or dumped into drains.
The writer champions interfaith harmony.
Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
