For Abortion: Requiring Legalization of Abortion in the Philippines

Abortion is a procedure to electively remove the fetus in a women’s womb to prevent its birth. This is an issue that has been a hot debate for so many years now. A topic that is hard for others to understand and even impossible to some. Legalization of abortion is necessary for a lot of reason.

There is no law in the Philippines that allows abortion even if to save the women’s life. The constitution that states this is copied from Spain’s law last 1870 during their colonization in our country. This law has not been changed since then. The law would criminalize the women who undergo abortion and also the person who administered it.

Our personal beliefs must be kept away from medicine. If you think that abortion is immoral, then don’t do it. Legalizing abortion is not just for nothing, it should be legal because it is necessary. There are many cases of women who experience complications during their pregnancy and abortion is the only way to save it to save its own life, I don’t see the reason why a fetus who is not living have more importance than the mother who is alive. Also, if the fetus is found to have a disease or deformation, the parent should have the capability to choose whether to terminate her pregnancy or not.

The Spaniards are also the ones that brought the religion that majority of the population of our country have. Currently, we are one of the fourteen countries that still ban abortion. With a population of 108 million people, 80% of it are Roman Catholics, the beliefs, values and morals that this religion encompasss greatly affect the standpoint of people towards the legalization of abortion. For them, it is a grave sin to terminate the fetus as it is equal to killing a person or murder. They consider a fetus as a person because it has “the presence of the spiritual soul and personhood” but if we look at it on the more logical sense, science and medicine, a fetus can only be called a biological human being if the brain begins to function which happens at about eight weeks from its conception. Also, the definition of murder by Oxford dictionary says that murder is the killing of one person by another person. If so, then abortion is not murder within the first trimester of pregnancy. A fetus without consciousness is just a part of a women, thus, it does not have any rights compared to the women carrying it.

Another reason for legalizing abortion is the concept of bodily rights. A women should have complete freedom of its body, she should not be forced to continue from an unwanted pregnancy. A women should have the choice whether to continue her pregnancy if she deems that she is capable of raising a child and/or if her body is safe to carry a fetus in her womb. I believe that no women should carry an unwanted child, and equally, no child should ever grow being and feeling unwanted.

Since legal abortion is banned in our country, people resort to unreliable ways just to attain what they want even if they know that there might be a harmful effect of it in their health. Abortion is a reality that is happening to a lot of women everywhere else around the world. The absence of legal abortion does nothing, it’s not like abortion was never around years ago, it only puts women at risk by forcing them to go to an illegal abortionist or even self-abort their pregnancy. According to the statistics of World Health Organizations (WHO), despite the absence of its legality, there are around 800,000 people who terminate their pregnancy yearly and nearly 100,000 of them are hospitalized. This is just in the Philippines, what more if add other countries?

If you feel that abortion is against your beliefs and it is immoral, then do not do it, you don’t have to shove your personal beliefs to other people’s lives. The teachings, beliefs, and values of your own religion should never influence our laws because it is a private matter and choice. Imposing one’s religious beliefs is against the constitution. Making our laws should be neutral to all citizens. I support abortion but I don’t promote it, this is not something to be abused and misused. I support this for the betterment of the women in our society and for their freedom of choice. Let us get a grip of the reality that is happening today and not be closed-minded.

I stand for abortion not because I have done it or I am thinking to do it in the future but because I respect the choices of other women, I am a medical person, and I think rationally. We are not entitled to decide the life of other person. We do not speak, represent and stand for others. Let’s us not force our beliefs to others, let our mind-sets be “That’s against my belief so I won’t do it” not “that’s against my belief, they should not do it”. I also want to add that religion, the government and medicine should be separated from each other because all of the them are very different matters.