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16 December 2003 Fetal
rights, children's rights
"IF A MAN helps a woman have an
abortion that would result in their child's death, he will be sentenced
to three to six months' imprisonment; on the other hand, if that very
embryo is not killed and gets to become a 14-year-old boy or girl and
then his/her father kills him/her intentionally, that brutal father will
receive a less severe punishment!"
That passage is from an article by Shirin Ebadi, this year's Nobel Peace
Prize winner. An Iranian lawyer, Ebadi was awarded the prize for her
efforts to reform her country's laws within a framework of human rights.
The first woman Muslim to win the Nobel Prize, Ebadi recognizes how
religion can be used to violate human rights, but insists that reforms
are possible from within the system. She does this by pointing out the
inconsistencies and contradictions in the penal codes. The observation I
used at the beginning of my article is an example, and comes from a 1997
article, "The Legal Punishment of Murdering One's Child".
In that article, Ebadi first describes very detailed provisions in
Iran's Islamic Penal Law when it comes to abortion. Anyone who causes an
abortion can be sentenced to three to six month's imprisonment but if it
is the father of the fetus who causes the abortion, the punishment is
imprisonment plus payment of "diya" or "blood
money," a kind of financial settlement made to the aggrieved party.
Now if it is the mother who causes the abortion, she has to pay blood
money but is not imprisoned, which Ebadi describes as a more
compassionate attitude. The blood money to be paid depends on the stage
of pregnancy. Aborting "a fertilized sperm placed in the womb"
means blood money of 20 dinars, going up to 60 dinars for "an early
fetus," 80 for "an embryo which has grown bones but not
muscular tissue" to 100 for "a fetus whose bone and muscular
tissue has fully developed but lacks a soul."
Ebadi's article does not explain how "ensoulment" is
determined, but apparently, if the embryo is considered to have acquired
a soul, then the blood money to be paid is equivalent to that paid for
an adult. Like adults, however, the embryo's "value" is
gender-based: female embryos, like adult women, deserve only half the
blood money paid for males.
Ebadi points out that given all these very detailed provisions in the
laws, the unborn are actually better protected than children already
born. A male who murders his son, grandson or great-grandson, for
example, only needs to pay blood money with "discretionary
punishment," which Ebadi says can be as light as "one lash of
a whip."
The inequities in Iranian law may seem archaic but we have a similar
paradox in the Philippines. Our Penal Code also has detailed provisions
on abortion, prescribing as much as reclusion temporal imprisonment from
12 to 20 years for someone who uses violence to induce an abortion in a
woman. If a woman requests an abortion, she and her abortionist can be
punished with "prision correcional," which means imprisonment
ranging from six months to six years of imprisonment.
If you read the provisions on abortion very closely, you'll realize how
fixated the law is over female chastity, with several references to
abortion as a way of "concealing dishonor." This fixation is
reflected as well in our definitions of murder and homicide. A person
who kills his or her own child will be tried for parricide, which can be
punished with life imprisonment. Yet a much lighter punishment of "destierro"
applies to a parent who kills a daughter (note: a daughter but not a
son) if she is below the age of 18, living with her parents and is
caught having sexual intercourse. The same lighter sentence applies if
the parent kills the daughter's "seducer" after catching them
having intercourse.
What is "destierro"? It is the same as prision correcional,
imprisonment of six months to six years. In effect, our Penal Code is
saying that a daughter's life, and that of her lover, is equated to that
of a fetus if she is sexually indiscreet.
Let's face it, laws such as those that I just described are concerned
less with the sanctity of life than with controlling women and punishing
female "dishonor." Note how abortion is usually depicted by
conservatives as the selfish act of "loose" young girls who
get pregnant out of wedlock. The conservatives refuse to deal with the
fact that most abortions involve older married women with unplanned
pregnancies, the numbers of whom are going to rise precisely because the
present government has made access to family planning more and more
difficult, supposedly because a "contraceptive mentality"
leads to abortion.
Our claims that we love children sound hollow when you look at the
number of cases of abandoned and neglected children, of children
battered and sexually abused, often by their own fathers, of children
forced to work in conditions more harsh than those of adult workers.
Christmas only highlights our "love" for children, as we see
child vendors out in the streets selling flowers, sometimes toddlers
forced to carry infants on their backs so motorists will feel more pity
and buy the flowers.
I remember one Christmas a few years back, when the incumbent Vice
President and Social Welfare Secretary put up a large billboard in the
Greenhills Shopping Center in a Manila suburb, urging motorists not to
buy flowers from the child vendors and to donate money instead to a
charitable institution. I regret not having photographed that billboard,
especially when the child vendors would gather beneath the sign, almost
as if in defiance, so they could string their flowers.
The billboard has long been dismantled but the child vendors are still
there, selling the flowers deep into the night. The secretary who put up
that billboard is now our President, one who spends more time speaking
out against abortion and family planning than launching concrete
programs for the Filipinos already born, for the Filipino children being
born, four of them each minute of the day.
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