Abortion

There is a very interesting article I found in one mailing list I join. It is about the legal abortion law in Tunisia, one country whose population is 99% Muslim. You can find it at http://dedepermana.blogspot.com (the article is in Bahasa).

As a feminist who believes that women must control their bodies by themselves, and not other people—such as their parents, husbands, boyfriends, or the country where they live—of course I do agree that option to have abortion is exclusively in a woman’s hand. Women—especially those who are more than seventeen years old so that they can be considered as mature enough to make big decisions for their own life—must really control their own bodies. They are free to do anything they want to do with their bodies; namely to choose what clothes to wear to cover their bodies, to have sex with whom they are willing to do it, to be pregnant with their sex partner(s) that they want, until to get abortion when they don’t want the fetus to grow up. And not to forget with the advanced technology that can make a woman pregnant without having sex with a man, or without sperm produced by a man.

Some advantages from practicing abortion legally in my opinion (there must be a strict regulation though; that is to do the abortion before the pregnancy reaches three months old)

1. There will not be any baby born without being needed and wanted by the mother, so that it will create a very good emotional bond between the mother and the baby. I assume that many babies are born from a mother who is not mentally and psychologically ready so that it can cause the mother to neglect the baby. Feeling neglected by the mother will create psychologically troublesome kid.

2. There will not be any new-born baby disposed in a garbage can, for example. It often happens in Indonesia because many women who get pregnant accidentally are not ready to get their babies, but they cannot get professional treatment for abortion. To avoid shame to deliver baby out of wedlock, many women dispose their babies.

3. All babies will be born in a ready family so that they will be raised well; mentally, psychologically, socially, and financially. They can get good education to pursue their future. This will result in a good future for the country as well.

4. No woman will die uselessly because she has to face unprofessional, unhygienic and careless abortion.

5. It helps succeed the government’s program to control birth (the government’s family planning program).

When the government succeeds to decrease the birth rate, the government will be able to give their best service to the citizens because they do not need much and much money for the citizens’ welfare (to provide good facilities for education, health, food and drink, transportation, etc).

To end this short article, I want to quote what Germaine Greer stated in her book THE WHOLE WOMAN:
What women ‘won’ was the ‘right’ to undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the governments who would not support mothers, the employers who would not employ mothers, the landlords who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that would not accepts students with children. (p. 86)

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