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Is abortion murder? When does life begin? And what of the overturning of Roe vs Wade?

But first, let me share my story.

We didn’t mind welcoming our firstborn. Of course, we would have preferred a slightly delayed arrival. But, heck, we had conducted a Christian wedding, and we were terrifyingly excited about our child’s arrival about a year later. Children, the Bible says, are a heritage of the Lord.

Then, three quick years later, the second born arrived. Again, unplanned. But, well, economically sustainable. Or so we reasoned. While the second delivery had also been smooth, we wanted this to be the last child we would have. However, both of us were a bit reluctant about taking hormonal contraceptives. We had heard stories of close friends who had struggled to conceive after using hormonal contraceptives. We were also aware that medical research pointed to a possible link between synthetic hormones and the development of certain types of cancers, which made us wary of making that choice. We considered the coil because it is non-hormonal but the way it worked seemed like abortion, which to us at the time was a most abominable sin.

We thought we could manage with natural methods, using condoms during the fertile window of the menstrual cycle, usually between the 7th and the 16th day. For a while, we thought we were acing it. However, and unknown to us, we were treading on dangerous ground.

When my wife conceived two years later, she was traumatized. In desperation, she suggested abortion. I, however, brushed the suggestion aside; I thought it was unethical and unbiblical. We kept the pregnancy. Those were some of the longest nine months of my life. The truth is my wife did not want the baby. She kept it at my insistence. Well, the baby finally arrived—tolerated more than celebrated, a low-key birth that even our parents learnt about much later.

After three accident-babies, we had to make a decision on some form of contraceptive—preferably a permanent one. The natural method had failed spectacularly. We had two alternatives: either my wife underwent tubal ligation or I had a vasectomy. From our reading, we saw that having a vasectomy was a simpler procedure, taking less than twenty minutes. I therefore decided to go under the knife and spare my wife a more complicated operation. It even sounded heroic.

I called the facility in advance and booked a date when I would have the vasectomy. It was a reputable hospital and the doctor was an experienced urologist who had carried out vasectomies for three decades without encountering any complications. It was time to bite the bullet.

I took the afternoon off from work one chilly Friday and went to the hospital where I found a small queue, nothing to make me fret. I waited my turn and saw the urologist at 4 p.m. A female nurse in a blue apron and well-fitting trousers stood beside him. Light-hearted introductions put me at ease and there followed a question-and-answer session during which I gave my medical history. Then I was asked to climb onto the surgical bed and remove all my lower garments.

I felt very uncomfortable.

It had not occurred to me that I would be doing this in the presence of the female nurse, or even that she would be involved in the procedure, taking hold of my penis, and presenting it in the position that the urologist required. In all my married life, I had not been in such a situation other than with my wife; it felt almost like sexual abuse. It didn’t help matters that the nurse was young and not unattractive. I gritted my teeth and looked up at the blue ceiling.

Then I thought of what my wife—and other women—go through in the offices of male gynaecologists and obstetricians. I swallowed a lump in my throat and let the thought slide. As expected, the procedure went well and I was out in 15 minutes. I even took a matatu back to my house and reported to work the following Monday.

I was advised, among things, to abstain from sex for a while (I cannot remember the exact days) in order not to jeopardise the success of the operation. I followed the advice to a tee. I was thrilled that my wife and I were now putting the subject of contraception behind us. My doctor assured me that the procedure was 99 per cent effective—or something close to that—and I did not think it was useful to worry about what the snowball’s chance in hell of something going wrong.

After about a month, I resumed my normal sex life. However, about a year later, Murphy’s Law would soon spoil the party.

It was the 31st day of my wife’s menstrual cycle and her periods had still not come yet for many months her cycle had been remarkably regular: 26-28 days. She said that she had not experienced the usual pre-menstruation signs at all. I dismissed her anxiety with a wave of the hand; three days was not anything to worry about. But two days later, on her 33rd day, the “visitors”—as we still call the arrival of her menses—were still nowhere to be seen. This time she was adamant; we bought a self-test pregnancy kit the same day.

I was still quite confident, unbothered even. I couldn’t be the statistical aberration. My wife did the test that very evening and brought me the results. They were positive for pregnancy! It was like a thunderbolt. But we read somewhere that the most accurate time for the test was in the morning hours, something to do with the concentration of the hCG hormone (the human chorionic gonadotropin is a hormone that is produced by the placenta during pregnancy) so we consoled ourselves with that information.

We awaited morning with a lot of apprehension, not untinged with panic, but the following morning the test came back positive. For my wife, having another baby was completely out of the equation. This time, I shared her views. To say that my wife was devastated is an understatement.

Abortion? That’s right. We were terminating the pregnancy.

Three children were enough. Four looked like a pandemic. We called the urologist in mid-morning hours and he gave us an appointment for a week later. That would be the 40th day. While I supported my wife’s decision to terminate the pregnancy, I was still a troubled man. I couldn’t reconcile this decision with my Christian worldview. Naturally, I turned to the Bible, to read the one verse that was constantly beeping in my mind, the verse about Jeremiah and how God had chosen him to be a prophet before he was born.

After everyone had gone to bed, I went to my study and opened the Bible, not for encouragement, but to ascertain its condemnation. I went for my favourite version, the KJV.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Strangely, this verse did not now appear to support the thesis of life before birth; certainly not that of personhood before birth. Instead, I thought it merely supported the thesis of the omniscience of God: the all-knowing, far-seeing God. In any case, I wondered what the “Before-I-formed-thee-in-the-belly” time was. When does God start forming people in the belly? If it’s at conception—when the egg and the sperm meet—then where is the autonomous personhood of Jeremiah before this time, the individual that God says he knew before this process and ordained to be a prophet? It could well be the sperm of Hilkiah, Jeremiah’s father, or the egg of Mrs Hilkiah, Jeremiah’s mother.

I put the Bible aside. Obviously, I was justifying myself.

Then when I was still turning over this text in my mind, I remembered reading Obama’s The Audacity of Hope where he argued that positions on abortion that ignored the science of foetal development were unreasonable. Of course, I had dismissed Obama at the time. I thought his was the standard view of the “irreligious” American left. I looked up the word abortion in the Bible but I did not find one mention. I went to bed still convinced that abortion was wrong but somehow not as convinced as I had been before.

In the intervening days, I poured through the science of foetal development. I knew that the embryo inside my wife’s womb was not more than two weeks old. Later, I would discover that before two weeks, it was not even an embryo yet, but a zygote, or something of the sort. I wanted to know everything that happens to an embryo at about two weeks: how it looks like; whether it feels anything; and which organs have already formed.

According to scientists, there are some Ultrasound procedures that can detect a heartbeat about four weeks after conception, even though there’s still no heart. It was a mystery that I couldn’t fathom. Still, this provided me with significant self-defence ammunition; if the absence of a heartbeat signifies death, the presence of a heartbeat should signify life. Therefore, there’s no life in my wife’s womb since the “baby” is less than two weeks old. Hence, there should be no guilt for murder.

Of course, I did not also want the embryo/zygote inside my wife’s womb to feel the pain that is usually associated with as serious a crime as murder. The document that most assuaged my conscience was the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ (RCOG) 2010 report on fetal awareness. According to the report, pain perception depends on the development of the cortex, which in turn normally doesn’t start to functionally develop until after about 24 weeks of gestation. Even with the development of the cortex, pain awareness is not guaranteed. This is because the experience of external stimuli will still depend on consciousness, which in turn comes significantly later.

I almost grinned.

The day of the appointment arrived and we made our way to the medical facility. The first test was a pregnancy test on my wife; both a blood test and a urine test. Of course, the test came back positive—even though I still hoped it would come back negative. Then it was my turn.

Did the vasectomy procedure really fail?

My doctor invited me to go into his office alone—unaccompanied by my wife. He told me that it was possible the vasectomy did not fail and that my wife may have “stepped out”. He asked me if I was ready to handle such an outcome.

It was a no-brainer; I trusted my wife completely. I gave the doctor the go-ahead to examine me to ascertain whether the vasectomy procedure had truly failed or if there was some monkey business. But he needed my semen for this test. He gave me a small specimen bottle, called my wife to explain to her what to expect, and walked us to a well-lit room with a metallic bed that was quite high.

In these circumstances, all my sexual urges disappeared like snow before the rising sun. It was almost two hours later that we managed to get going. After another hour, I went back with the semen specimen that had been procured without any passion—without any enjoyment or sexual pleasure. After carrying out the necessary tests, visibly surprised, the doctor announced the results. The vasectomy had failed. He gave my wife two tiny tablets, to be taken at six-hour intervals and also offered to do a repeat vasectomy at no charge.

My wife took the tablets as directed and the “visitors” got the cue. Over the following four days, she would experience what resembled her normal menstruation, only a tad heavier and lumpier. That was it.

I did not go back for the repeat vasectomy. I think I just gave up because of discouragement. However, I still believe my case was just an exception. Of course, the thought comes to me once or twice a year—when I wonder about what might have become of the “baby”. Still, it’s never accompanied by crushing feelings of regret or shame.

The subject of abortion has never ceased to intrigue me. I have quietly followed the abortion debate, admittedly seeking to justify my decision, even though I rarely admit this.

In the Christian world, it is a settled matter. Abortion is murder because life starts at conception when a sperm cell enters an egg cell and their genetic materials mix. Never mind that even after this meet-up and subsequent fertilization, the chromosomes do not mesh well in as many as 90 per cent of cases—and most are discharged unnoticed from the body. So, when a woman aborts, there is a high chance that she is aborting what may not have become a baby after all. Some have adroitly avoided this dilemma by arguing that life begins not at conception (since conception is chaotic and in a majority of cases is not successful), but after the chromosomes have mixed up successfully and settled into a rhythm.

Also, zygotic splitting, which leads to the formation of separate twins, usually takes place a few days after conception. This definitely upends our ideas of individual and autonomous personhood—especially at the time of conception. At this stage, the one-cell zygote is definitely biological life. But whether it’s an individual human life is another matter altogether. Still, some argue that life begins when the zygote burrows into the walls of the uterus, a process called implantation, which takes place about a week after fertilization. And while many argue that the starting point of life should be at the first occurrence of a heartbeat—which is usually after about four weeks—some insist it should be much later, when brain-wave patterns emerge. Then there are those who hold the view that life begins when it is viable outside the warm confines of the womb. The jury, as they say, has long been out.

Then there is the issue of whether the life of the unborn is equal to the life of the mother.

The Bible commands that “When there’s a fight and in the fight, a pregnant woman is hit so that she miscarries but is not otherwise hurt, the one responsible has to pay whatever the husband demands in compensation. But if there is further damage [such as the death or injury of the mother], then you must give life for life.” (Exodus 21: 22-23-MSG Version). Clearly, the life of the unborn, warranting a mere fine, is not the same as the life of the mother.

Mishna, the first major written collection of the Jewish oral tradition, has this to say:

If a woman is having trouble giving birth, they cut up the child in her womb and brings it forth limb by limb, because her life comes before the life of [the child]. But if the greater part has come out, one may not touch it, for one may not set aside one person’s life for that of another.

This shows that the life of the baby only assumes equal significance with that of the mother at birth. A different passage addresses the situation of a pregnant woman who has been given a death sentence. Apparently, the pregnant mother is executed even though there is an innocent “human being” in the womb. However, should labour pains begin before execution, the baby is spared since it is now recognized as a human being with the right to life.

In African traditional societies, many ethnic communities allowed abortion, which goes to show that it is not just some foreign idea foisted upon us by Western agencies such as Planned Parenthood. In his book, A Study of Abortion in Primitive Societies, Georges Devereux, a Hungarian-French ethnologist, describes how 400 pre-industrial societies sometimes encouraged, or even commanded abortion. Of course, there were others where abortion was met with resignation or even deep horror. According to Devereux, Maasai women had to abort the children of sick or old fathers. The Ashanti women of Ghana were expected to abort if they had been involved in premarital or adulterous affairs. The Baganda princesses were not expected to marry as this would cause tension between patrilineal and matrilineal succession lines—leading to widespread abortion. Among the Chagga of Tanzania, women were not expected to give birth after their daughters were married. They would therefore abort.

Of course, culture says nothing about normative ethics. The Kikuyu, for instance, killed twins. But in this age, that practice would be horrifying even to the most militant crusaders of African culture.

The story of abortion is a story of life. And from where I sit, life is so mysterious. You cannot just draw a line and say that “this is the beginning thereof”. But in overturning Roe Vs Wade, I think the Supreme Court has travelled back to the future. The back and future of a fascist church and state alliance.