Dear Editor,

In this abortion discussion we must realise that the issues that are coming up go far beyond the reasons the legal killing of children in the womb should be allowed, or not.

They are:

1) The secret ballot: Secret ballots have been for individual voters to protect themselves from political intimidation. However, secret ballots in the case of parliamentarians, would protect them from political accountability. There is a difference.

If the public has no right to know how their elected representatives vote they have no means of evaluating how well they have been represented.

Another election process after such a vote is not real democracy, because the people would be deprived of the right to know who and what they are voting for.

In order to support legalising abortion, the abortion proponents are willing to strike at one of the foundations of our democracy.

2) Abortion on minors without parental knowledge: I thought we had common ground on protection of children, and on the right of children not to be trafficked, abused, prostituted, and so on. In the context of minors who become pregnant as a result of being sexually abused or trafficked, legal abortion without parental knowledge is the easiest method of coerced cover-up.

In order to support legalising abortion, the abortion proponents are willing to expose child victims of sexual harm to further harm.

The abortion opponents are pejoratively painted as policing women's bodies and rights. Yet the characterisation conveniently avoids their concern: The right to life of distinct human beings who cannot yet put an argument forward for themselves.

On the other hand, the abortion proponents are clearly willing, beyond the current issue of legal abortion for adults, to propose the erosion of the democratic rights belonging to all Jamaican adults and our children's rights not to be abused.

Whether or not this was the intent, the trajectory is clear. Moving towards abortion moves us all towards a society with diminished human rights. Jamaica should “take sleep and mark death”.

Antoinette Walker

antoinette.walker32@aol.com