By Ekakoro Emm
Next to the gay debate, abortion is one the most divisive arguments on social media, with no in-betweens. Needless to say, it is a subject I prefer to stay away from. Only daredevils like can argue about it and come out unscathed.
So today, I notice this lady I’ve been seeing for some months going to a neighbor. Only thing is that the last I saw her about a week ago, she looked about seven months pregnant (turns out I was spot-on). And today her tummy was as flat as Akothee’s, or as flat as a generous diet of waru without exercise can permit.
I ask hey, did she give birth already? Looked to me like she had a little bit further to go before the big day.
Her best friend tells me she got rid of the pregnancy because she doesn’t want another kid. She adds that this is the seventh pregnancy she’s got rid of in two years.
Without moralizing about it, I gotta ask: if you have decided childbirth is not for you, for whatever reason, 1) why continuously have unprotected sex? With seven terminated pregnancies your own fertility ought to be obvious and as the sages say, prevention is better than cure. Why not simply avoid getting pregnant? And 2) if you have decided that contraception is not for you (even condoms? And considering that the seven pregnancies are from different men – as reported by the said friend – this is advisable for health reasons as well), why carry a pregnancy for a whole seven months before terminating it? Whether you believe in the divine law, the closer you get to delivery, the more human that foetus gets, to the point that it some point we’re not talking abortion, but murder.
Recall that Sharon Atieno’s killers are also accused of killing a seven-month old foetus. There seems to be consensus between the pro-lifers and pro-choice that this was murder. I wonder what the pro-choice would have thought if Sharon had lived but decided to terminate her pregnancy last week, at seven months…. Would her right to choice still have held? I am reliably informed that at 7 months a foetus can live outside the mother’s womb. Is this true?
At what point do foetuses acquire rights? At what point does it move from a woman exercising her right to choose, to outright murder? Someone educate me today I beg.
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