Filipinos would’ve ‘killed’ Roe before it turns 49

By Alex P. Vidal

“If you’re a pro-lifer, please remember: if life begins at conception, it sure as hell doesn’t end at birth.” ― Quentin R. Bufogle

IT took America 49 years to put away Roe v. Wade (born 1973; died 2022).

If the same judicial phenomenon happened in the Philippines, Filipinos wouldn’t wait for 49 years; they wouldn’t even allow Roe v. Wade to prosper.

In fact, Roe v. Wade wouldn’t exist—or, it’s “dead on the spot” if the sensational Supreme Court landmark decision which generally protected a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion occurred in the Philippines in 1973.

Roe v. Wade would be a misnomer in the Philippine statute—because, in the first place, there would be no Filipino Jane Roe and Filipino Henry Wade; and, therefore, no abortion litigation.

If a Filipino Jane Roe wants to have abortion, she will never approach any lawyer to challenge the Revised Penal Code that criminalizes abortion in the Philippines.

She will do it secretly or incognito even at the risk of her life (the original American Jane Roe, actually, didn’t have abortion. Before Jane Roe, a fictitious name, died in 2017 at age 69, she was able to talk to her grown up daughter, the fetus she failed to abort, on the phone. Jane Roe wanted to abort the baby when she got pregnant in 1969, but the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision came in 1973. The baby was born in 1970.)

Henceforth, there’s no case for the Filipino Jane Roe and, ergo, there’s no Filipino Henry Wade who will act as “district attorney” for the government.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 800,000 abortions performed in the Philippines, even as it reported that 70 percent of unwanted pregnancy ends in abortion despite legal restrictions.

According to the Department of Health, 100,000 people ended up in the hospital every year due to unsafe abortions.

As punishment for the patients, some hospitals have reportedly refused to treat complications of unsafe abortion, or operate without anesthesia.

For Filipino women who want an abortion, to hell with Roe v. Wade.

Abortion can never be legalized in the Philippines where its system and customs, to some extent, almost always tilts to full theocracy due to the age-old influence of the Catholic Church.

Many American and Filipino women have mixed views and stand on abortion mainly because of differences in culture, beliefs, demography, orientation, and even values.

It’s hard to assert the reasons of pro-choice advocates who have lamented the overturning by the Supreme Court of the United States of Roe v. Wade by a 6-3 vote on June 24 however “acceptable” and relevant they may be in today’s age vis-à-vis the Christian values.

In an opinion she wrote in the New York times dated June 20, 2022, Pamela Paul stressed that “there are good reasons American women overwhelmingly choose having an abortion over giving up a child for adoption. Childbirth is the far riskier medial procedure. America has one of the highest material mortality rates in the developed world.”

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Mark Brown, in the Journal of Medical Ethics, pointed to an influential essay titled Why abortion is wrong, written by Donald Marquis, who argues that killing actual persons is wrong because it unjustly deprives victims of their future; that the fetus has a future similar in morally relevant aspects to the future lost by competent adult homicide victims, and that, as consequence, abortion is justifiable only in the same circumstances in which killing competent adult human beings is justifiable.

“The metaphysical claim implicit in the first premise, that actual persons have a future of value, is ambiguous,” Brown wrote.

“The Future Like Ours argument (FLO) would be valid if ‘future of value’ were used consistently to mean either ‘potential future of value’ or ‘self-represented future of value’, and FLO would be sound if one or the other interpretation supported both the moral claim and the metaphysical claim, but if, as I argue, any interpretation which makes the argument valid renders it unsound, then FLO must be rejected. Its apparent strength derives from equivocation on the concept of ‘a future of value’”.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)