Despite being a permanent resident in Taiwan, as an American woman, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a roller-coaster of emotion.
Adding to that pain have been all the people who cannot get pregnant offering their opinions on whether women are entitled to basic human rights, as though anyone with a uterus is just a potential incubator.
If anything, I feel grateful to be living in Taiwan, where my right to reproductive healthcare still exists, although it might be imperfect.
Taiwanese law allows for abortion, but carries a whiff of patriarchy. For instance, a married woman seeking an abortion requires spousal consent.
The language of the original law is also unacceptably eugenicist; it references “upgrading the quality of the population,” but not women’s rights.
To be clear, abortion should absolutely remain legal in Taiwan. If anything, the law must be amended to make abortion a basic right, not a eugenicist fantasy.
Thus, imagine my disappointment reading Dino Wei’s Taipei Times article (“Abortion laws affected Taiwan’s society,” July 7, page 8). His argument rests on seeing women as breeding stock, not human beings. This should horrify anyone capable of becoming pregnant.
Bodily autonomy means a person’s body cannot be used against their will, even to “save the life” of another. We do not do this with any other procedure. Even if someone is the only suitable organ donor to a dying person, we accept that they cannot be forced to give up a body part. We do not even do this to corpses without prior consent.
Therefore, even if you believe a fetus is a person, it is still unacceptable to force someone to carry it against their will.
It does not matter if you are offended by the person’s sexual behavior. In other words, abortion is not a referendum on whether women having sex is bad (it is not).
Most of Wei’s arguments offer little to no evidence. He wrote that “gynecologists are even lamenting” this trend. Which gynecologists? Name some, please. “Young students use abortion as contraception”? There are no statistics to back that up. If the “vast majority” of abortions are performed for health reasons, and data on how many are unintended pregnancies remain confidential, one cannot possibly know that. If abortion rates are falling, that directly contradicts the assumption that younger women are seeking it.
Many of these young women and sad gynecologists likely exist in people’s heads, not the real world.
Even if young people are getting abortions rather than using contraception, the solution is not to hijack their bodies to increase Taiwan’s population — the solution is improved sex education. This should be obvious.
Most offensive is the assumption that Taiwan should rethink abortion because of population decline. Most people want children eventually; the solution to population decline is to foster a society where people feel secure having children, not treating women like egg sacks.
We are not egg sacks, we are people.
Jenna Lynn Cody is a teacher trainer based in Taipei.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations