Women must have a choice

The Day received an open letter addressing the leadership of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and the Roman Catholic Church of Ukraine (full Ukrainian text is on the Gender Museum’s website http://gender.at.ua/), namely the Rev. Sviatoslav Shevchuk and Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki, concerning their call for a ban on abortions in Ukraine.

The letter reads: “We … hereby express our negative attitude and adamant objection to your urging the Verkhovna Rada to ban abortions in Ukraine.” The authors do not approve of abortions but believe that “women must not be denied a choice; they must make their own decisions in regard to their body and destiny.” The authors – among them the leaders of women’s movements, heads of consortiums, organizations, psychologists, experts on gender equality, etc. – believe that “this ban will not make women give birth to children they do not want to have; it will give a strong impetus to illegal abortions, raising health risks… a ban on abortions will become a greater evil than abortion… By referring to abortions as acts of genocide you blame such women for a deliberate destruction of Ukrainians – women who resort to abortion as a last resort, being in a desperate situation, having no alternative, rather than doing so as a whim. You appear to forget that women aren’t to be blamed for the current situation in Ukraine, which is best described as a demographic crisis. Our population is on a downward curve because of a high death and emigration rates…” (This is response to Rev. Shevchuk’s statement on www.pravda.com.ua: “Over the 20 years of Ukrainian independence we have consciously and deliberately murdered 40 million children. In other words, the Ukrainian nation, numbering 40 million, ceased to exist over this period. Compared to this statistic, the children who have been born in the past 20 years are survivals, ones who have been fortunate enough to escape from their parent’s murderous hands.”)

The authors of the open letter insist that the UGCC hierarch uses unverified and overstated statistics: “Official statistics point to a quick (six-sevenfold) decrease in the numbers of abortions since the early 1990s, totaling some 200,000 a year.” They ask Rev. Shevchuk rhetorical yet topical questions: “What can the Church offer a woman who is pregnant despite her will and because of circumstances? Is the Church prepared to assume responsibility for the upbringing, education, and future of such unwanted children; for the consequences of such forceful maternity? Why does the Church allow herself to ignore the woman’s rights while upholding those of the child?”

Use of contraceptives is another issue raised by the open letter: “Considering that the Church forbids her adherents to use contraceptives makes it obvious that the Church wants to turn the woman into a child-producing machine, so there are more citizens and above all adherents of the Church.” The authors remind that this is nothing new in history, and all such previous attempts “brought no benefit to society and suffered a fiasco, sooner or later.”

The letter reminds of what happened in 1936 when abortions were prohibited in the USSR, that this “caused an avalanche of illegal abortions with all negative consequences, with a sharp increase (70 percent) in women’s death and infanticide rate in the early 1950s,” that the Soviet government nullified this ban and made abortions legal in 1955. In conclusion, the authors propose to ponder the consequences of such ban in today’s Ukraine where “most residents are below the poverty level, being unable to afford quality health care, with alcoholism, drug addiction, and prostitution getting to be like an epidemic.”