Banning abortion won't mean more babies

DECLINING BIRTH RATE Banning abortion won't mean more babies

By Lynn Lee, Correspondent

ANTI-ABORTIONISTS will have us believe that by embracing their cause, we can ensure the stork will come. Want to boost baby numbers? Limit access to abortion, ban it even, and Singapore's depressing birth rates would be history. Assistant Professor Tan Seow Hon is among proponents of this view. In these pages last week, the law professor suggested that since Singapore wants more babies, it would be timely for Parliament to review the law on abortion, with a view to banning it. Abortion has been legal here since 1970. The law was further liberalised four years later and has stayed roughly the same since. A woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy of up to 24 weeks without restriction. It is simplistic to believe that removing this right will have a positive and lasting effect on Singapore's baby numbers. Firstly, abortion is a tool to terminate pregnancies; it does not cause people not to have children. Prof Tan confuses an effect of abortion (fewer babies) with the cause of falling birth rates (couples not wanting babies). Banning abortion will not lead couples to want more children. The reasons couples give for rejecting reproduction or opting for minimal baby-making have been repeated ad nauseum. They range from not wanting to raise children in an overly-competitive society to a lack of financial resources to bring up more than one or two children. The Government is correctly trying to address these concerns through a slew of schemes. How successful they will be remains to be seen. Secondly, banning abortion may cause a temporary spike in births, but at a terrible cost. If abortions were banned, with women having no other choice but to deliver children they don't want, Singapore would boast an average of 12,000 more infants each year, according to abortion statistics from the last five years. This is not a small number, certainly. It would mean over 50,000 babies born here each year, bumping up the total fertility rate (TFR) from the current abysmal 1.29 to roughly 1.7, a somewhat less abysmal figure. For a population to reproduce itself, the TFR needs to be at least 2.1 But what price are we prepared to pay to temporarily increase the TFR? How many teen parents would we be prepared to accommodate - for an average of 1,300 abortions were performed on women below the age of 20 in 2005 and 2006? How many babies suffering from birth defects should society be prepared to look after? Prof Tan asserts that the reasons the Government gave for instituting the Termination of Pregnancy Act some 40 years ago are no longer valid. She is right on one count: Population control for economic advancement is no longer necessary. Singapore now needs to expand, not decrease, its population to ensure economic growth. But it would be heartless to see babies as just potential cogs in the proverbial wheel. Every child deserves a chance at the best possible quality of life - one they are more likely to have if they are wanted by their parents and they are healthy. Allowing women the option of abortion helps ensure that as many babies as possible are wanted and healthy. Prof Tan suggests counselling women to welcome unwanted pregnancies, and programmes to help women deliver unwanted babies to be given up for adoption to couples unable to conceive. These are sound suggestions. They can be instituted by the state or anti-abortion civic groups - without having to remove the option of abortion. What is unsound is Prof Tan's labelling of abortion as a criminal activity. Clearly, it is not; the law allows for it; it is legal. So why such emotional language? The choice of words suggests an argument impelled more by religious conviction than by concern for Singapore's fertility rate. Many look at abortion through religion-tinted lenses. They see it as 'criminal' because they consider it murder; and they think it is murder because they believe life begins at conception. They have every right to hold such views. But we should be clear about the source of their views. As the American philosopher Robert Audi points out in his book, Religious Commitment And Secular Reason: 'the reason for (the) belief that personhood begins at conception may be less what the arguments for this show than a confidence in authority, say papal or clerical authority, or a sense of intuition on the matter, perhaps a sense of intuition taken to be religiously inspired'. It is to be expected in a multi-religious society like Singapore that religious (or even non-religious) convictions of all kinds will undergird views on social policy. And we should welcome and encourage citizens to explain their stands, regardless of whether religion (or the lack of it) has shaped their views. But the rules should be different when it comes to advocating for or against a particular public policy, a point Professor Audi also makes in his book. Citizens, he says, must feel obligated and be willing to offer adequate secular reasons, especially when they support laws or public policy that restrict the liberty of others. Prof Tan herself made this point in a commentary last year on how both religious and non-religious arguments have a place in society. She cited as 'attractive' American philosopher John Rawls' idea of public reason: that citizens should offer reasons in public debate that they think are reasonable for others as free and equal citizens to accept, even if the positions they are advocating are undergirded by religious convictions. This must mean that anyone who advocates laws that restrict the rights of others must be transparent about his or her motivations: Do the secular reasons he advances stand on their own or are they a camouflage for religious convictions? In Singapore's case, no adequate secular reason has been advanced in the recent calls to ban abortion. The reasons Parliament advanced some 40 years ago for the Termination of Pregnancy Act remain reasonable. We would pay a dreadful price if we were to allow unreason to unravel this law. lynnlee@sph.com.sg