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.
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