Essay: Abortion and Women Rights

Few good people have tried to take the problem of female feticide head on but even they don’t seem to be bothered by intentional killing of female fetuses and female-biased abortions so abound in developing nations like India and the subcontinent.  The question and the answer are simple, but they probably have recognized the solution to be very difficult.

People who condemn abortion and contraceptive means on the grounds that such acts help proliferate dangerously low female to male ratio are either ignorant or charlatans.   The fact is that the social stratosphere in such countries is immensely warped against women.  The classic and the traditional norm support women suppression in all walks of life including teen years, schooling, working and housekeeping.  They are the one who render women useless and they are the one who view women as stones of burden.  Life is full of paradoxes, this one happens to hit half of humanity. 

There is something direly wrong with a society in which a parent may find drowning their newborn girl easier than raising her up.  It is not only a psychological theory but a biological conclusion that death of a child is the most unnatural occurrence and hence deepest tragedy for a parent.  Raising a female child has to be worse than this atrocity for a parent to commit such heinous act. 

Naturally if we keep the anti-women sentimentality as a constant and relieve all anti-abortion laws, this will surely result in hike in female-biased abortions.  And once again the society will live with a warped view of reality.  Social revolution cannot take place one step at a time.  It is one of the very few phenomena that don’t work this way.  Simply legalizing abortions will not contribute to the problem of female-biased abortion.  In fact, it will aggravate it.

But if a girl has freedom to go to any school, attend any college, get any job, earn for her family, she is then not a burden but a dignified member of a family.  Revocation of all the traditions that inhibit a female’s freedom and plunge her under dependencies is the first step towards an equal and female-biased abortion-free society. 

Infringement of freedom has many faces, some even the strictest of moderates may not agree with.  For example, females in developed countries tend to marry at a much later age as compared to those in developing nations solely because they can afford a living.  They are not dependents.  A developed and civilized society encourages every human being to be independent in life and thought process.  A human being can only be independent in entirety when there are no legal commitments.  If we think about it, a commitment is a romanticized term for slavery.  It is then reasonable to say that marriages are a logical conclusion of dependencies when seen from a woman’s viewpoint. 

For earning, independent women, marriage is an onset of her lineage of family.  For uneducated, dependent women, marriage is a transfer of burden.  And for a society that discourages every norm which supports women liberation and independence, their women tend to pose burden for their parents, who in turn encourage early marriages.  Moreover, as a compensation for relieving burden off of their shoulder, parents indulge in dowry which usually takes place via abusive and humiliating chain of events.

Why then parents raise a girl child? Why shouldn't they hope for a boy who can earn for them?  When met with such questions, a parent does what it thinks is best for them and the other children, and also, logically, is best for the child they are about to kill.  A child who has a future of repressions has a better chance with no chance at all.

Freedom has to come from all directions.  Most difficult area to liberate is the area of sexuality.  Sexuality must not be repressed.  Many have called marriages as a mean to live with dignity and have sex at the same time.  For odd reasons, developing nations are strictly anti-sex.  But they are the most populous nations in the world with objectionable number of STD cases and deepest of prostitution nexus. Again, the point is repression creates perversion.  Sexual repression creates sexual perversions.  Clearly something is wrong with a society when a lifelong commitment is the only answer to sex.  

Such dark imagery needs to be banished.  It is incumbent on the government to pass radical laws encouraging complete freedom for women from all dependencies including sexuality.  This will shock many parts of the society but this is the time to electrocute them out of their miseries. 

Government must not provide any special subsidies for married couple.  Every couple, unmarried or married, with children must have equal benefits.  Married couples with no children deserve no special tax exemptions.  A parent’s responsibility should be towards their children and not towards one another.  Instead of giving special privileges to married couple, government should encourage live-in relationships.  It can do so by helping couples find accommodation in “broad-minded” localities, protecting threatened couples by providing police security or even relocating them to an undisclosed foreign location.   Media should actively take part in harassing bodies of people who advocate anti-women customs and traditions. 

Women rights issue has often been viewed as much smaller segment of social revolution than it actually is.  Fight against women repression is fight against majority of the social backwardness and oppression.  If fought with rigor, I firmly believe we will peel away social evils such as caste system and religion bias, one layer at a time.  But we can’t peel a middle layer and then ponder why the whole system collapsed on top of each other.  That’s why we can’t simply legalize abortion and hope that the newly warped freedom assigned to women will help solve the whole tree of problems. We have to start peeling out each and every layer of oppression in the society.  It will end with the end of religion and marriage.