Pro-Life or, if you
please, anti-abortion movements aren't something I follow. Now, it
appears that a relatively low-key pro-life campaign has started in
Latvia, using the rather clever device of placing 27 statues of
sleeping full term babies on the ground in a square near the Freedom
Monument (a kind of entrance to the Old Town). Each of the babies had
a small label in three languages, Latvian, English and Russian,
stating what amounts to a kind of “Bioethics 101” problem along
the lines of “my dad abused my mom, he drank, she had no place to
go, no work...etc.”
Basically, the 27
bioethics “problems” (it is said that 27 abortions are preformed
every day in Latvia) are meant to be thought provoking, though (I
have glanced at most, but not all of them) they skip over such cases
as rape, especially the rape of an underaged girl, incest and other
examples where abortion is probably the only solution.
The installation also
doesn't deal with issue of fetal viability, something best left to
scientists, but basically a standard for determining that, up to a
certain point in a pregnancy, the fetus is not able to live outside
the mother, even with massive medical assistance. In other words, the
standard determines that up to XY weeks of gestation, an aborted
fetus would have no chance of living and its biological existence up
to then must be weighed against the interests of the woman or young
girl facing an unwanted pregnancy.
What concerns me is that
these pro-life thought provokers may have another agenda, more in
line with the hard-core religious right. At least one of the
organizers of the installation and campaign is former Soviet-era
Latvian dissident Jānis Rožkalns. He is a very brave and decent man
(did time in the Gulag for his actions and beliefs). However, in the
past more than 20 years, Jānis has aligned with at least one
right-wing religious cause – opposition to gay rights, gay pride
parades and the like. I participated in debate against him and
another religious hard-liner, the Riga City Council member Jānis
Šmits and a retired Catholic archbishop and Cardinal, Jānis Pujats.
I took a libertarian position, that any and all public expression
must be permitted.
It would certainly be good
if this particular “pro-life” action was simply one to make
people think whether abortion is a desirable form of “contraception”.
Indeed, the next step should be actions to address the social
problems in some of the examples given – preventing violence
against women and the sexual abuse of under-aged girls, broad sex
education for children age 12 and up, and an acceptance that
adolescent sex is inevitable, therefore contraceptives must be
available if all other “restraints” fail --Christian chastity
advocacy, non-sectarian sexual ethics lessons, whatever.
So, giving the benefit of
the doubt, let's see where this goes. But I have a nagging feeling,
that under all this are people who would like to see abortions
banned, to declare that an inviolable life starts at conception and that Latvia should be made into a sexually repressive theocracy.
I must say that abortion is a creepy thing for me. I would rather not have it as an inevitable choice for women or couples, but creepier, still, is the idea of law-mandated forced birth and the suspension of personal choice and autonomy for any woman the instant she becomes pregnant for any reason and under any circumstances. So given the choice, I tilt toward free choice.
