Friday's Times (May 21, 2010) carried a full-page article entitled "The Right for HIV Positive Mothers to Access Abortion Care". Though the article jumped around a lot (touching everything from abortion on demand to breast feeding to Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission), hopefully we can all share the common ground of supporting women. If supporting women included not asking or pressuring any woman for sex (and not accepting any invitations from women for sex) before marriage, the number of women carrying the virus would fall dramatically. So, how about making abstinence before marriage the primary focus and tool for ending the spread of HIV? In addition to slashing the HIV rate, this would build more self-disciplined men and women and create stronger, more loving families.
When it comes to allowing HIV+ women to abort because they are HIV+, one must ask if one tragedy deserves another. An HIV+ mom will likely die before she ever expected to; is this a good reason for killing her child? UNICEF ran its "Unite For Children, Unite Against AIDS" program a couple of years ago. It would be tragic if that slogan were changed to say "Unite Against AIDS and Children".
The saddest part of Friday's article was the part that said some HIV+ moms choose abortion "because of the discrimination that mother and child are likely to face." The solution to this problem lies in ending the discrimination, not humiliating the mother and killing the child. Killing the child, it would seem, is a very severe form of discrimination. Ending the discrimination would signal an increase of love and respect among all citizens-and that is something we can all support.
As this space has documented, abortion is not a simple medical procedure like pulling a tooth. Many women experience extraordinary anguish leading up to an abortion, and many women suffer deep medical and emotional injury (including sterility and years of crippling regret) afterward. Making abortion just another topic alongside "microbicides" and "baby feeding options" downplays, to all mothers' detriment, the tremendous seriousness of abortion.
Let's show love and respect to women by keeping sex where it belongs: in marriage. Let's respect the lives of HIV+ mothers and their unborn children by providing them life-affirming help. Let us cast off the false notion that offering a mother in need the opportunity to kill her child through abortion is ever a loving thing to do. Let us build a culture of love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
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