I am all for people going childless. A hysterectomy at any age is between you and your uterus. If two adults decide against a mini-me, it is nobody else’s business. After all, biology need not be destiny. Nothing about making human beings is pretty, neither the bearing of them, nor the bringing up of them. All that energy—and money!—are better directed at a creative pursuit and the world will be a less noisy place for sure.
But supposing we do wish to multiply and are dying to dandle a little baby on our knee and coo at it in a talcum haze, then what are we really hoping to push out? A perfect baby, that’s what.
Whatever be our looks or IQ, we feverishly hope those nine months for unlimited beauty and brains in our yet to be seen offspring. We imagine ourselves pushing a pram through playgrounds and smiling beatifically at people who stop to peer and break into raptures. This is the best baby ever! No baby we give birth to would dare be anything other than an angelic Einstein!
Then baby arrives and all soiled diapers hit the fan. Nothing pans out the way we plan. No pre-natal scan can point out every single anomaly. Physical imperfections are the least of it—what if he/she is within the autism spectrum? If we knew our child would have mental health issues or would commit suicide at some point? That they’d be prone to depression and live their life in a drug-addled daze? Be a mass-shooter? Or have an accident that paralyses or a disease that kills? At what foretelling do we say, okay, not having this child.
Life is tough enough for a so-called normal child, so if we learn of any foetal imperfections it is thought best, and understood by one and all, to de-baby yourself. That is, go in for medical termination of pregnancy. You can’t do that to a child, everyone nods. What they mean is, you can’t do that to yourself.
Unless fatal to procreate, a foetus deserves a fair chance; post-conception is too late to dilly-dally. As Dr Seuss says, a person is a person, no matter how small.
Most kids somewhere down the adolescent line ask you in all earnestness, ‘why did you have me?’ This could be because you refused them a sleepover or because you oppose their choice of spouse. I should have been swallowed, they will say, and you are embarrassed because that has occurred to you once or twice.
Speaking as a former baby, I am up for debates on the subject. If you ask me, my right to life was granted the moment a sperm met an ovum. That was the miracle. The rest—me in my adult body trying to eke out a living – is an anti-climax.
So when Pope Francis says that abortion to avoid birth defects is a little like Nazi eugenics, I am surprised to find myself agreeing with a religious opinion. Though I wouldn’t bring God into it, I suspect babies are our tools for spiritual evolution. We watch babies grow, they watch us grow.
If I had listened to doctors and aborted both times, I would not have my two today. And what is shocking is that none of the medical warnings turned out to be true. My kids are ‘normal’ in every sense. Though how ‘normal’ a mother they think me I dare not ask.
Shinie Antony
shinieantony@gmail.com