Would abortion provoke murder?

When my son had warned me not to propose abortion as a topic for our morning conversation group at the Georgetown Library I scoffed.  Our participants are sophisticated, well-educated professionals.  Still, when Monday morning rolled around, I had debut nerves.   

Peacefully, one at a time, seven participants gathered in the sunny room on the second floor of the library.  Ella, a teacher of Chinese to foreigners in the engineering department at a university in Beijing, as usual was the first to arrive.  Willowy, with closely cropped curly hair, Ella was elegant in a dark dress enlivened by a long navy sheer silk scarf with bright orange and green embroidered flowers.  She made me happy I had chosen my outfit carefully.   Anna Maria, an Italian economist, and Hoon, a dentist from South Korea, completed the well turned out chatty trio.  Hoon recognized a pretty young newcomer named Jihyn as a compatriot.     

When Pablo arrived we warmed up to our main topic, which this MIT-educated computer engineer had spawned as a follow-up to our grab-bag exercise on ethics, taken from an article from NPR that I had used the previous week  to demonstrate income inequality. 

There was neither controversy nor disagreement, for in their countries abortion is legal though with some restrictions.  In China, however, abortion is a delicate subject.  Parents are shy about talking about it with their children, according to Ella, who has served as an informal parental surrogate for more than one of her students.  For high school students who want to try out physical intimacy, Chinese schools offer lamentably little guidance, nothing more than a video.

 Mexico is divided between Mexico City and the countryside, our lawyer Mayra told us: the indigenous people do not even know there is a controversy surrounding abortion.  They believe in god and have a different ideology from people living in Mexico City where, alone in Mexico, abortion is not only legal up to 12 weeks; it is widely available and paid for by the city.  The indigenous people, however, like Trump’s supporters, believe that life begins at conception, while for those living in Mexico City women now enjoy the constitutional right to decide what happens to their bodies.  Anything else is considered harassment.  Women from other regions travel to Mexico City for abortions.  

The avid Pablo had read the article I had posted on Facebook but, following my son's advice,  I had not used as a handout, about getting an abortion in DC back in 1966.  Pablo had even gone to 14th and K Streets NW to see where girls waited for an abortion taxi sent by an abortion mill in Virginia.  
     They took turns reading a simple article about abortion that left a lot of openings for conversation.  Jihyn, who mixed up r’s and l’s, benefited from reading aloud, and the others read confidently.  Anna told us that in Italy the right to abortion was decided by referendum; there, where nearly everyone is Catholic, the only choice is whether to believe or not, unlike in the USA where there are so many religions and forms of practice.  Joking on the square, Anna added that only women should vote on abortion.  To Anna, having a referendum is the only sensible way to prevent politicians from using the issue to enflame emotions as is happening in USA  now.

There followed a discussion of religion, started by Chloe, a graduate student in traffic engineering who had arrived late.  Chloe believes in a god who promotes free will, not an angry god who punishes.  Anna mentioned that the Bible was not written by Jesus (contrary to what members of megachurches in the USA are told to believe), but by (gasp) men.  Anna went on to say that abortion is a moral problem about which people can agree or disagree.  Freedom of religion does not mean that everyone should be held hostage by one belief system.  What a paradox that pro-lifers are also pro-gun.  

The foray into religion led to an interesting digression.  We learned from Pablo that megachurches also exist in Peru where the latest scandal involved a church so rich it could buy a famous stadium.   In 2014 the Peruvian Congress debated an abortion case involving rape but did not come to a conclusion.  

It was not clear whether Hoon’s opinions about restricting abortion were held by others. In her view, in South Korea abortion is restricted, but not outlawed, arguably for two reasons: to keep the population from decreasing more; to keep women from becoming more like men.  Chloe explained that in the USA birth control pills are paid for by insurance.      

Wishing to reward my peaceful participants for their intelligent, respectful, and calm conversation, we finished off our session on a high note with some light-hearted articles.  The first was a humorous feature from the New York Post about how some goats employed to keep weeds in check in Riverside Park had been fired for being too voracious about their job.  Pablo could hardly believe that the article was literally about goats.

As usual, short articles from theweek.com did not fail to amuse.  The group applauded the incentive reported at Curry Pizza Co., in Fresno, California, of one free pizza for groups of at least four who agreed to surrender their cell phones: Anna had even been to a restaurant in Miami that offered a pretty basket as a temporary resting place for phones.  Mayra temporized about the temptation to use a cell phone in countries where wifi is available mostly in food establishments.  A squib about Illinois police requesting people to stop buying cellphone cases shaped like handguns provoked hilarious disbelief.

         The success of such a potentially explosive subject as abortion (and distribution of wealth last week) speaks to how intelligent and well educated our participants are, and I told them as much!  As a note, Chloe is in the final stages of writing her doctoral dissertation from GW on how to reduce vehicular pollution in China.  When she asked for a reference on writing in English I suggested Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.  Chloe's sexagenarian advisor, who has been bugging her through endless revisions, is old enough that he most likely follows it.
On our Facebook page, Hoon clarified her comments as follows: HoonJeong Hwang Thank you for your note. I think our law used to punish doctors who treated the pregnant women and involved women without exception, but according to the newly made judgement of Constitutional Court, it is not right to punish all the abortion cases. It seems very passive for abortion. We still have not established a law which defines the range of permits about abortion yet.
The reasons for abortion I mentioned totally came from my own opinion. It is believed in Korea that having a baby is a family work rather than a personal issue. We have believed that a fetus can have a life as soon as its conception. We traditionally ages a baby 1 year as soon as he or she is born.