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ABORTION
I Grew Up Catholic — and I Believe in a Woman’s Right to Choose
Seek, and you shall find — a moral question with no answer.
Warning: references to the act of abortion in this article may be disturbing to some readers.
At my all-girls Catholic school in Trinidad, I don’t remember any of us thinking abortions were a good thing. If an older sister, cousin, or aunt had one, it would have been kept from us. And if we did know, we’d have been too ashamed to talk of it, except in the closest confidence.
I have only vague memories of us addressing abortion in Religious Education classes or student-run school assemblies.
But I do remember girls asking, in animated voices, if I’d seen the videos, the gross upsetting videos — haunting videos of chopped-up babies? Because apparently, chopping up babies was how abortions were performed.
Strange how the memory of their descriptions of videos I never looked at remains with me.
Abortion to us was clearly murder. Murder in the womb. The Church’s opposition to abortion made sense to us. We imagined the pain inflicted upon these innocent growing beings. It could have been any of us, if our mothers hadn’t chosen life over death.
In Religious Ed, we learned about abstinence as the ideal way to avoid both pregnancy and abortion. We learned about the rhythm method too— to be used during marriage. We may have learned a bit about contraception in general — and why contraception, and some methods in particular, were frowned upon by the Church, but my memory of that can’t be relied upon.
Still, some of us had sex anyway. And a few of us had teen pregnancies and babies too.
After a Catholic education, destroying the life growing within us might have been unthinkable. But if by chance we wanted out, would we have had safe, legal access to ending a pregnancy?
No, because abortion was, and still is, illegal in Trinidad.
In Trinidad, safe access was, and still is possible, if you can afford a willing gynecologist or a skilled GP. This would be hush-hush of course; the doctor’s only punishment, a whispered reputation as ‘an…
