Translator: Leyre Bastyr Reviewer: Helene Batt
Once, years ago,
I saw a television program about abortion
in which a group of professionals argued fiercely.
It was a ping-pong game of opinions and arguments.
"It's a crime against life." "It's a woman's right."
"It violates the human rights of an embryo."
"Women are the victims."
"Life is more important than liberty."
"The fetus is not a person."
"Don't kill it, give it up for adoption."
"Liberty and rights aren't biological matters
and cannot be left in the hands of the Church."
A harsh debate, heavy and with grounds.
Finally, they focused on the scientific debate,
whether or not there was a person in the aborted fetus and why.
In the background, separated from the center of the scene,
several women listened quietly.
They were there to show reality.
They had been invited to talk,
not to say what they thought,
but to testify about what they did.
The controversial tone had emerged, at one point the program's host
turned to these women and asked what they thought
about what was being discussed.
One of them said, while the rest of them nodded:
"I don't understand what they're talking about."
This sentence is more a reflection of perplexion than incomprehension.
These women didn't recognise their experience in the terms
in which the experts wanted to explain it.
For them, the conflict didn't lie in defining a human being,
nor in speculating at which point we begin to have human rights,
but in deciding whether or not they would have a child.
Right around that time I had started to write on the topic
and I was immersed in texts that were for or against.
I also felt that perplexion.
I had had an abortion
and I couldn't say without being cynical
that I had been a free woman when I had the abortion.
It was a shock.
I was unable to vocalize each letter
of the slogans "free choice,"
"autonomy,"
"my body is mine,"
those to which I myself had adhered.
That's when I had to think...
think about what I simply assumed.
Think about how I talked, what I said,
who I spoke to and what I wanted.
And I discovered that I talked in code
and I came across formulas I hadn't even considered,
that were unrelated to my experience and that even turned against me.
I could no longer defend what I had repeated for years.
The wealth of reasoning, principles and arguments,
that I used to use to defend the legalization of abortion,
had become useless.
I couldn't play that part.
I found myself at a moral crossroad.
How could I define what I wanted with arguments I didn't believe in?
If a friend calls me and says she's pregnant,
that she has decided to abort and she is distressed,
I don't tell her, "Don't worry, it's just a fistful of cells,
it's not a human being.
Anyway, you are an autonomous individual, you have the right to your own body,
it's your free choice..."
No. I go with her without arguing.
How many women here today
had an abortion or were scared of becoming pregnant
and finding themselves in the difficult situation of having to decide
whether or not to have an abortion?
How many men here today
have gone with a woman to have an abortion
or pushed her to do it
or asked her not to?
I invite you to ask a group of friends or acquaintances,
the following question:
"Do you know a person who has killed someone?"
Later on, to the same group, ask them this question:
"Do you know a woman who has had an abortion?"
You will see that everyone knows, even if indirectly,
a woman who has had an abortion. But very few, if any,
know someone who has killed someone else.
Some hold that abortion is equal to homicide.
But those same people, if they are asked, outside of the debate,
having forgotten the topic, if they know a murderer,
they will be hard-pressed to identify a woman they know that has had an abortion
as a murderer.
In the face of this storm of opinions and arguments,
this great confusion,
science is asked to determine: is an abortion killing a person or not?
But even scientists,
or those who ask for their opinions,
can't agree on when a human being comes into existence.
Biological and genetic evidence seems to be at the heart of the debate,
the serious part, the one that doesn't allow any "blah, blah."
However, with the same scientific rigor,
you can demonstrate both, that the embryo is a human
and that the embryo is not a person.
Let's see.
If I want to condemn all abortions without exception,
my option will be DNA,
which will allow me to demonstrate that, from the moment of conception,
a unique, unrepeatable and special person exists.
If I want to legalize abortion, I can choose as a date,
as a distinctive feature of the beginning of the existence of a human being,
feeling, and place its beginning three months from gestation,
or choose conscience and date it between the fifth and sixth month
with the beginning of the brain's development.
What do we see?
That relying on science
can help both, those for and those against.
So, if every stance can be equally defended,
neither one proves anything.
I think this isn't useful.
I think that all of the evidence constructed
on the basis of rigorous scientific investigations are useless.
In the matter of life, it is of no use to anyone,
nor do they remember, the arguments discussed in the debate.
And they don't put them in use.
The vicious cycle of the abortion debate goes approximately like this:
to demonstrate that abortion should or should not be legal,
one needs to first show that abortion is or isn't homicide.
But this depends on whether or not the embryo is a person.
But, really, the question that matters is when it begins to be a person.
And to see when it begins to be a person,
we need to choose which scientific fact from embryology
is convenient for us to use when we decide
what the distinctive feature of the beginning of morality in biology is.
And one question follows another question,
showing that it is homicide,
or showing that it is not homicide,
and that vicious cycle continues.
So, why does the abortion debate still revolve around
the question of when a human life begins?
Why don't we set aside that debate?
It might not be easy to overcome the temptation
to use a moral standpoint, an ethical decision,
and the responsibility, and the politicization of life
in science,
leaving it to the authority of science, to the knowledge of science.
But when one moves over to ethics, or what is usually called ethics,
one can be left-wing, or right-wing,
and in either of those cases be in favor or against
legalizing abortions.
Lenin allowed it, Stalin banned it.
It is legal in the United States and in Cuba.
And right now both conservative Rajoy in Spain
and anti-imperialist Correa in Ecuador condemn it.
You can be Catholic and defend abortion as a woman's right.
You can be atheist and condemn them for aborting.
Even when you talk about human rights,
the abortion debate makes the strength of our ideologies waver.
For me, this was very hard.
But for the abortion debate, the two most valued terms,
the most precious for human rights, life and liberty, face death.
And it's not as if those from one or the other side lie or are hypocrites,
it's that human rights allow us to defend both viewpoints.
The reasons of human rights, as well as the reasons of science,
don't help us leave the vicious cycle.
The main protagonist of the discussion on abortion is the embryo.
If it is or is not a person, to determine if abortion is or is not killing.
The woman becomes a mere place where the embryo resides.
But if it were only up to the characteristics of the embryo,
throwing away a test tube embryo should be considered an abortion.
And it isn't.
It's not even in the most repressive legislation,
just as not even in the most repressive legislation
abortion is considered a homicide.
So, if a test tube embryo is not considered an abortion,
if throwing away a test tube embryo is not considered an abortion,
it seems as if what makes us human is not our genetic makeup
but to be born from a woman's body.
To be, or to have been, in her body.
That is exactly what the word "pregnancy" means:
to be of, to be the body, one body.
There is no abortion without pregnancy, but even though this sounds incredible,
pregnancy is not spoken of in the abortion debate.
How can you talk of abortions without talking about pregnancy?
These arguments manage it.
They talk about a conflict between two individuals,
a woman and an embryo,
that have contradicting and opposing interests.
But a pregnant woman is not a woman plus a fertilized egg.
She is not a sum and she is not a divisible compound.
There is no abortion without pregnancy, and because pregnancy
is not always the result of liberty,
how could abortion be the result of an act of free will?
Under what conditions could you call a woman who opts for one "free"?
Does any situation even exist, where willingly having an abortion
consists of acting freely?
We use "freedom" in two ways:
no one prevents me from acting, is one,
or that I can do what I want.
Now, why is it that, for me to demand that abortion be legalized,
I need to become violent or stupid
saying that I want it recognised that I control my own body,
or that I will have children only if and when I want?
A woman who has an abortion is not free.
She is moved by a pregnancy she did not seek
and, above all, does not want to continue,
and which compels her to make a violent decision.
Free will is not free. This woman is between a rock and a hard place:
she does not want a child, nor does she want to abort.
She wants to retreat and cannot, it is not possible.
She wishes she had not gotten pregnant.
She would rather have a miscarriage.
Then, like with many other things in life,
she decides to do something she does not want to do.
Whether it represents a tragic or unpleasant situation,
this woman is at the crossroads where life and death are at stake.
They are all right, and they all lose something.
Hearing that they were not fully free when they aborted, many women are calmed,
as if they knew but hadn't been able to put it in words.
What causes relief?
It sounds contradictory, but we lose contact with death
if we don't name it.
It is a disaster to trust that the right can resolve life's tragedies,
and a disaster to assume that there is no pain,
or that if there is, someone is guilty.
The experience of having an abortion
shows us that the body does not fit in with rights,
and that the abortion problem does not end with its legalization.
So, neither science nor human rights
are a well where we can sate our thirst.
We see how we drink and drink and are ever more thirsty.
So, when we are given arguments in which we do not see ourselves,
arguments that expect to explain our actions
at the cost of leaving out our experience,
when they throw us a bone of ideas we cannot embody,
it is better to submerge ourselves in different waters,
in waters that, at the beginning, seem murky because they are moving,
but they are ours.
And swimming across is the only way we can claim our experiences.
(Applause)