Image is mine
Whenever the right to abortion debate comes up, people tend to be very emotional and sanctimonious about it. I know I have had this debate countless times and then I end up looking like one heartless monster without morals.
The only reason people go anti abortion is more from a religious perspective.
One vitals that people fail to realize is that pregnancies equal human beings and human beings equals societal growth and development.
The number one problem with underdeveloped society is over crowding and a population that is unproductive leading to the available resources being over stretched, of which right to abortion and the awareness of it can curb.
If you check societies where poverty is worse hit, you’d see that they have high fertility rate and low level of productivity. These societies are not productive because most of these households or women birthing these children do not have access to the basic necessities of life. Thus the children grow from a place of lack and almost zero opportunities.
If most of these women have the needed enlightenment and the assurance of safe abortion procedures, none of them would want to give birth to a child whose future is already threatened from infancy.
I am a Development Economist who also doubles as a welfare official and I can say for a fact that anti abortion is more detrimental to the Economic growth of the nation and also to the mental health of the mother.
In my opinion, family planning or preaching of abstinence is not enough to prevent unwanted pregnancies because we all know humans do not all function in the same mental capacity to listen and obey.
While the government has made provisions to curb unwanted pregnancies through family planning and the need for abstinence through sex education, they should also extend right to abortion to any woman who feels she does not have the financial capacity or mental capacity to be a mother.
It is fact that from procreation, to nurturing and caring, till the adulthood of a child’s life, the mother is worse hit.
She sacrifices her career, she sacrifices are happiness and she sacrifices her body and if she is unlucky to not have a supportive partner, she will find herself drowning in life challenges and when she’s tired of grasping straws, she starts to let go of the excess baggages and burden.
In such cases, we find children being dumped at the dump site and abandoned in orphanages. We find children being at the mercy of sexual predators because they need to survive without parents.
And I ask, if the government can give right to abortion to rape victims and mothers whose life is being threatened by the fetus, why can’t same right be extended to women who do not fit into this category but do not feel the need to keep the pregnancy due to one life challenges or the other?
One thing is that, in a bid for these less privileged women to have another short at life without the burden of motherhood, they end up in the hands of quack doctors and harmful abortion procedures.
Some people might want to argue abortion is murder and I want to ask which is worse? Terminating the fetus before it comes in contact with the world or birthing and let it die from Lack or go on to becoming a societal problem?
Then there are those who might say abortion is a risk to the woman’s life.
Fact is, abortion, like every other birthing procedure is safe when handled by professionals.