Dr. Barnett Slepian was your typical American OB-Gyn, an affable 52-year old man respected and well regarded in his neighbourhood, happily married with four sons, and highly recommended by his patients. On the evening of Friday, October 23, 1998, Dr. Slepian had come home from the synagogue and was tinkering in the kitchen, trying to make himself a bowl of soup when a shot rang out. The next instant, a bullet shattered through the kitchen window and smashed into Dr. Slepian’s neck, killing him instantly.
His killer – James Kopp, a man popular as ‘Atomic Dog’ in the extremist group Army of God. Dr. Slepian’s crime – he provided abortions at his clinic.
Abortion is a deadly issue in the United States. Between 1977 and 2000, there have been seven murders, sixteen attempted murders, and forty bombings on abortion providing clinics in that country. Few other nations have seen such violence related to the issue of abortion – which essentially boils down to a tussle between two viewpoints – a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy vs. the belief that life begins at conception, and hence abortion is murder.
Even as most nations of the world, including some states in the USA, have legalized abortions in certain circumstances, the furore it generates in American public life can make or break presidential bids, inform public policy, bitterly divide people, and in the case of Dr. Slepian, get them killed. This is precisely why the debate on voluntary termination of pregnancy is largely an American debate, with countries such as India, Japan, China, and France having achieved broad public understanding on the issue fairly smoothly. While India and Japan allow abortion in instances of sexual assault or in the face of maternal health risks, China and France allow abortions on demand regardless of motive.
In America, the abortion battleground looks like this – to the right are the people who believe that abortion should be illegal no matter what the circumstance, and that a foetus has as much of a right to life as do living babies. These groups, together referred to in popular culture as the ‘pro-life’ camp, are led by a large section of the Catholic Church, and are flanked by hard right Christian groups such as Army of God. The pro-life camp argues that abortion is immoral, because life begins at conception. Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the USA and one of the most visible anti-abortion personalities, put the pro-life view succinctly when he wrote in 1983 – “We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life-- the unborn-- without diminishing the value of all human life.”
To the left are the groups that assert a woman’s right to choose her own motherhood without interference from the state. Somewhat predictably, this group (‘pro-choice,’ as it is called) is led by feminist advocacy groups, who draw much of their support from liberal communities and the country’s constitutional guarantees on individual freedom. The pro-choice group argues that imposing blanket bans on abortion is illegal and conflicts with a woman’s sense of empowerment. Banning abortions, argued American author Edward Abbey, “amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.”
With such diametrically opposed views separating the protagonists, the debate over abortion, often unruly and violent, rages on with no end in sight. However, there are many areas of commonality between the two sides. Faced with difficult situations such as pregnancy from rape or incest, or a scenario where the risk to a pregnant person’s life is too great, many pro-life advocates concede an abortion is acceptable. Likewise, many pro-choice activists seek to limit the time frame for abortions, opposing late term abortions as unethical. The challenge to policy makers, therefore, is to harness such synergies and present an acceptable, sensitive, and workable solution that ends the debate over medical termination of pregnancy.
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Bhaskar Hazarika is a laid back writer who prefers finding patterns in clouds to running rat races. This attitude however does not infringe on his professional committments, as past and current employers have
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