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    Defend Life

    Following on from an earlier post on abortion, I read a very good letter to the editor in a recent New Internationalist issue.

    defend life (fith heading from the top)

    Women’s rights (NI 373) falls into the contradictory trap of confusing abortion with issues of rights and equality. Abortion is often a result of inequality, sexism, poverty, social prejudice, disempowerment, social expectations and male-oriented structures. By presenting abortion as a solution, these problems are reinforced, often leaving women to deal with abortion alone while others, often men, walk away and social issues remain unaddressed. This is neither progressive nor feminist.

    Abortion involves discrimination and violence against the unborn, which many supporters refuse to confront whilst ducking behind the rhetoric of ‘choice’ and branding anyone who disagrees as ‘anti-woman’. Ironically, in the same issue, the NI refers to the sex-selective abortion of female babies as ‘violence’. In reality abortion means that those deemed to be unwanted, due to disability, sex, poverty, being conceived at the wrong time, social shame or pressure are aborted. Do the lives of the poor, the disabled or females matter less when it comes to abortion?

    Being pro-life is neither rightwing nor anti-woman – many early feminists were pro-life. We need to be supportive, socially and economically, of people in difficult situations rather than promoting abortion. What is needed is a reappraisal of the Left’s approach and a consistent commitment to defending life as the basis of justice, through opposition to all things which degrade it, be it war, abortion, infanticide, poverty, weapons of mass destruction or capital punishment.

    Daniel Bampton Yogyakarta, Indonesia

    Related Posts:  »Survival »Fighting to the Death »More on Morality

    Posted: May 23rd, 2005 under Moralising.
    Comments: none

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