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Saving Motherhood or Destroying It?

From 25 years' obstetric experience in southern Affica, David Clegg asks: does abortion in the developing world really lead to 'safe motherhood'?
Gradually the carefree play of girlhood becomes interwoven with a more serious approach to life. She matures earlier than her brother. Her vision for the future which may have expressed itself in dolls and imitations of domesticity becomes larger than that. It is to care for the world as she sees it. The way she sees it also grows, and depending on character, culture and circumstance takes on a shape unique to her. Her vision includes the need to prepare, to protect, and to pass on. As her body develops she recognises new powers that are hers. Young men react to her in different ways. She has the power to tame or to inflame their competitive and territorial tendencies.

She may devote her motherhood to a family of her own, to a world wider than a family, or to both. A mother's face is normally the first symbol a newborn baby sees and hers are the first eyes with which it establishes contact. The new child comes to associate her face with motherhood. Society is attracted by motherhood and expects it to be gentle and protective, especially of children. Motherhood is cohesive and healing, holding a family around her, and bonding society together.

A Christian perspective
For the Christian, biblical teaching will add its own values to the patterns built into creation. This teaching may be seen as optional by a multicultural society, but Christians have a responsibility to protect the mechanisms built into creation for its smooth running as well as a responsibility to make the saving knowledge of Christ available to others.

Today, society is offered technology with the intention of separating sex from reproduction and is then offered abortion as a solution when the contraception fails or is forgotten. This may be destroying motherhood physically, socially and psychologically on a scale greater than any physical lives saved. A mother may have been educated by society to adopt a 'pro-choice' approach to life which is in conflict with all in her illness and her body that fits her for motherhood. She is trapped in a double bind by a secular humanist mindset and a human nature created in the image of God.

Mothers (and fathers) who have in the past agreed to abortion, sometimes against their better judgement, and who have subsequently found faith in God have reported suffering years of inner turmoil, pain and regret. Only in Christ have they been freed to bring these issues out into the open and deal with them. One scene from a video shown at the recent ICMDA Congress in Durban comes vividly to mind: the mother had had no peace for years until she got out of bed one night, went downstairs and wrote letters to her three aborted children asking for their forgiveness.

Is a cost-benefit analysis of abortion possible?
'Safe Motherhood' is a term coined to refer to methods of reducing maternal mortality and morbidity associated with pregnancy. It includes abortion legislation, which has been associated with a reduction in maternal mortality in some countries which carry enough controls on how it is practised. How much of that reduction would have happened without the law we do not know.

Similar legislation in low income countries is likely to have more complications as a direct result of procedures used without adequate controls on practice. However, the indirect long term complications may cause mortality and morbidity in ways that are not being measured. For example, young unmarried girls in the cities of developing countries queue for termination as a quick fix when they find they are pregnant. They may have no intention of changing their lifestyle, which brings them material rewards in a depressed economy, and their doctors busy in their private practice may have neither time nor inclination to warn them of such dangers of that lifestyle as HIV infection.

Valuing the gift of motherhood
Abortion is a cheap way of limiting births and some maternal death. Elimination of poverty would achieve more. How do we discover abortion's indirect complications, and measure them and put a price on them? What are its effects on mother and child bonding, family stability, child and spouse abuse, and mental illness, not to mention wider effects on national and international welfare?

We must measure what we can but if we believe God made us in his image we should also treat ourselves and our patients according to this belief, even if we do not understand all this means and cannot measure all the consequences of its abuse. The gift of motherhood needs to be valued at least highly as the gift of sex, for both are part of God's creation. The descendants of Rachel wept when King Herod ordered all boys in Bethlehem who were two years old and under to be killed. A nation that loses that ability to weep is a very, sick nation.

David Clegg is the Overseas Support Secretary of CMF and the General Secretary of MMA
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