A Matter of Choice

A nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix recently had to choose between religion and humanity, and ended up choosing ethics over faith.
In defiance of the dictates of her faith, thus, she ordered the abortion of a 11-week-old foetus. This led to her being excommunicated from the faith she had chosen to serve, a faith that unconditionally treats abortion as sin.
The ruling by the bishop seems to have considered only the action, and not the cause that led to it – for if Sister Margaret McBride hadn’t authorised the emergency abortion on the 27-year-old pregnant woman who arrived at the hospital due to complications and an illness that threatened her life, she could well have died.
The story forces you to think: If caught in such a situation, how will you choose, and what will your choices be based on? And will it be a blind choice, or one where you actually have to think to make the choice?
In the 2004 film Vera Drake, Oscar-nominee Imelda Staunton gives a bravura performance as a working class woman in 1950s London who helps women in need abort the babies they do not want to bring to this world. It’s telling that when her deeds are unearthed, and the men who ‘uphold’ society condemn her to imprisonment, her first thought is about the women that she won’t be able to help anymore.

At a larger level, the film and the more recent incident involving Margaret McBride makes you think: Why is it that there are two different yardsticks for men and women, even after more than twenty centuries of cohabitation on this planet? Why does a male-dominated society make it tough for women to make choices? On the one hand, we have four ‘liberated’ women seeking sexual adventure in their menopausal years, albeit on the silver screen; on the other, sex crimes, honour killings and female foeticide/infanticide continue unabated in lesser-liberated countries, where women are seen either as sexual objects or as wombs to keep the family tree growing.
In an era where revered men of the Church are mired in paedophilic controversies, in an age where a celebrated film-maker sodomised a 13-year-old girl and fled his country to escape conviction and now lives in a Swiss chalet (and is seeking exoneration, no less), in a time when village panchayats, invariably led by men, rule on the fate of women who marry within their gotra (lineage), in a society where man can do no wrong but woman can’t decide for herself, what really can women, liberated or otherwise, lean on? An unknown (mostly) male God, whom they believe will deliver them from earthly suffering? Or an inner moral compass that doesn’t allow them to stand by and let another human suffer?
How would you choose?