Roe V Wade reversed A Bhagavad-gita perspective on the US removal of women’s right to abortion

Podcast:

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
What is the Bhagavad Gita perspective on the reversal of the Roe V Wade case by SCOTUS, the Supreme Court of America, which has now deprived women of the right to abortion? Answer, I’ll first talk about it, what has happened from the legal perspective, then we will talk about the ethical, sociological, financial and spiritual dimensions of the issue. So, basically, since 1973, the Supreme Court in America had, through a judgment, a case which was called Roe V Wade, decided that everybody in America has a right to abortion. Now, the decision which was made in the Dobbs case recently was that there is no constitutionally ordained right to abortion.
The court cannot make laws, it is the legislative assemblies, the senate and other such bodies that make laws. The court said that the previous decision was wrong. And this hasn’t changed the legal status of abortion immediately.
What has happened is every state will now be able to decide or will have the responsibility to decide. So there are states which are more right wing, they may bring more and more restrictions on abortion and there are more which are left wing, which may remove all restrictions on abortion. Some states have already proclaimed their intention to become abortion sanctuaries.
So, this is what has happened. And there has been a sustained prolonged conflict between the pro-life and the pro-choice movement. And at this point, one key insight from the Bhagavad Gita which could be vital is the concept of not reducing people to their positions.
This Krishna calls in the Gita as knowledge in the mode of ignorance. So, the way it is currently portrayed in the polarized world that we live in is that the left portrays that if anybody who opposes abortion, they hate women and they hate women’s rights. And the right, it portrays that anybody who supports abortion, they hate babies.
They want to kill babies. And the reality is often much more complex. The 63 million abortions have happened since 1973 after Roe v Wade made it legal.
So, just to give context, 63 million is actually more than the number of deaths due to direct war in the Second World War, that is estimated to be 50 to 60 million. So, it’s huge. Now, is it that there are so many people who hate babies, so many women specifically who get abortion and who hate babies.
It’s too simplistic to reduce the position of pro-choice to hating babies and pro-life. It is not that they hate women. To phrase this issue as a women’s right issue is itself a ploy which makes anyone who opposes it as anti-women.
But let’s look at it from a slightly broader perspective. Unfortunately, as tempers have been rising over this issue, there is extremism coming up from both sides. Some pro-life activists in the past have attacked abortion clinics and have been attacked and wounded on some occasions, fatally abortion performing medical service providers.
And on the other hand, those who are pro-choice, they have also attacked some pro-life clinics, some activists. There were aggressive demonstrations outside the houses of conservative Supreme Court judges. There was even an assassination attempt made towards one of the judges.
So, temperatures are rising and to the extent we demonize the other party, any kind of sane, level-headed discussion or tangible resolution is going to be difficult. So, let’s look at it first from the ethical perspective of the issue. So, abortion is sometimes portrayed simply as, in India when the law was passed, supporting it was called as medical termination of pregnancy, it was called MPP.
And it was portrayed as a measure for population control. Often it is, the embryo is portrayed as just a tissue, which is to be removed. And there has been systematic attempts to deny the reality and the gravity of abortion by the pro-abortion lobby.
There is a movie made on Pure Flix, Unplanned, which tells the conversion story of Abby Johnson, who was an abortion activist, who headed a clinic in Bryan, Texas, and who facilitated over 22,000 abortions. And despite doing so many, she herself had no idea of what actually happens in abortion. It was only when there was a staff shortage that she was asked to fill in.
And that time, she actually saw how the fetus is just like a miniature human being with arms, hands, legs, and how it is systematically mutilated and decapitated. And it’s killing. So, the ethical dimensions of the issue are obscured by trying to prevent people from knowing the reality and the gravity.
There is an argument that the fetus is not actually a person. Well, from a scientific perspective, the potentiality for a human being is non-different. Biologically speaking, the embryo has all the potentiality for a human being.
And there is no decisive biological marker, which is non-arbitrary, which can say, at this point, the embryo becomes a human being. And at this point, it doesn’t. Some arbitrary marker can be made, but there are atheist philosophers like Peter Singer and others who said that a woman should have the right even to abort after the baby is born.
And then his and atheist philosophers or materialist philosophers’ propositions led to a furor. They said, don’t be sentimental. From a scientific perspective, the location of the embryo makes no difference in its status.
So, if while the embryo is in the belly, is in the womb, the embryo can be aborted. Then from a scientific perspective, there’s no difference in aborting outside. So, if you want to go down the slippery slope, where will we stop? Can a five-year-old child be aborted by parents if they want to? So, as far as the moral worth and the moral status of the embryo is concerned, most people intuitively understand that it’s a baby.
Consider the situation where mother wants to, mother or parents want to have a baby. And then from the earliest sonograph, where the baby might mean a thing more than just a shapeless lump of flesh. It is much more than that.
But to the vision that we can see in sonography, even when there is that, at that time also, the parents are to discern, oh, this is the head coming out, this is the arms coming out. And they feel such joy and affection and pride. So, is the ontological status of the embryo dependent on whether we want it or not? That means if we want it, oh, it’s my baby.
If I don’t want it, it’s just a lump of flesh that I’m going to remove from my body. No. So, it is just by passing a law this way or that way, the issue is not going to be resolved.
But at the very least, there has to be unfiltered or unsuppressed transmission of information about what actually happens in abortion. So, fetal personhood can’t be denied because whether it is the fetus, the embryo, the infant, the youth, the adult, they are all stages of the same person. Now, having said this, then the question comes, why has human society come to a place where so many women want to abort their child? Unless we look at it from the sociological dimension, issues cannot be resolved just by legislation alone.
Why are so many women not wanting to have children that they want to go for abortion? This idea of unwanted children is also mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita, where the word uses Varna Sankara. And it is seen as a valid social concern. However, the solution over there is not to abort the child, but rather to reorganize society in a way that is according to virtuous principles so that the circumstance of unwanted children doesn’t come up.
Now, what has happened in today’s world, when this is made into a solely women’s rights issue, then it also becomes a woman’s responsibility issue. And if you want to consider who benefits from abortion, why is there such a strong push to defend abortion? Let’s look at who benefits. When it’s phrased as women’s rights issue, it’s women who benefit.
Now, how do they benefit? That in most cases, pregnancy doesn’t pose any serious health hazard to the women. There are exceptions, of course. But in most cases, it’s not a health hazard.
So calling it as a reproductive health issue is generally a misrepresentation. Yes, it is an issue which has many dimensions. Women, if she has a child, it may affect her career, it may affect her looks for some time, it may create some financial challenges.
If the mother and father are not married, then having a child means having a relationship with that particular person, even if they didn’t want to have a relationship. Or at the very least, it means carrying the child to term and then giving the child for adoption. So these are disruptions, these are inconveniences.
But they are not directly health issues. So the phrasing of it as a reproductive health issue is extrapolation from rare exceptional situations. So when I said that it is phrased as a woman’s rights issue, it also is made into a woman’s responsibility issue.
What does that mean? In the past, say before abortion became widely legalized across the world, if a man and a woman united, say it was outside the context of marriage, and if a woman became pregnant, the man would have to take responsibility. And there was something called shotgun weddings, where the woman’s father would go with a gun and tell the man to marry. Now, that’s certainly not the best way to get married.
That’s certainly not the best way to get pregnant. But the point is, abortion now gives men free license to indulge in their baser impulses without having to take any responsibility. So a woman is told if she becomes pregnant, you know, why were you not on birth control? Why are you not taking the pill? It’s your problem.
Now you take care, you get rid of it. So it’s an unfairly heavy burden to place on the conscience of a woman that she has to take the responsibility for ending the life that is growing inside her. And one way that unfairly heavy burden is dulled is by making the woman believe that there is no life over there.
It’s just some tissue. So men’s irresponsible instincts are also pandered to, catered to through abortion. Beyond that, who benefits? The whole abortion industry benefits.
It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. And there is a huge amount of money. And that is why during the pandemic, when the whole world was shut down, when even many important medical services were shut down in most parts of the world, abortion was deemed an essential service and continued on.
So it’s huge money. And so those who are making money through this industry, they benefit from it. And beyond that, even the government benefits from it.
How is that? The government doesn’t have to create arrangements for child care, for accessible and affordable health care for the children that are going to grow up. So abortion is a way to evade responsibility and mint money for a lot of people. And certainly a woman is directly affected when she becomes pregnant, but it is an issue of humanity and perpetuation.
So it’s reproduction is not an individual issue because one individual doesn’t reproduce, it needs two to reproduce. So phrasing it as a women’s rights issue makes, it actually reduces the complexity of the dimensions of the debate. So this, when it is made into a women’s rights issue, what happens is, rights brings a lot of emotional, everybody wants liberty, freedom, rights.
But there are other dimensions to the issue to be considered. So from a sociological perspective, it is true today that unwanted children could mean that having children has become quite expensive, even within marriage. What to speak of when it happens outside marriage or before marriage.
And there are of course exceptions when it may happen because of sexual assault and other things. But the point is that society has become structured in such a way that having children is expensive and motherhood is often seen as a burden. That even parenthood in general may be seen as a burden.
And so this is where we need to consider the spiritual perspective. Here by spiritual I mean, what is the meaning and purpose of life? What is it that truly nourishes our spirit? When we believe that, or we are made to believe by a materialistic worldview, that the purpose of life is just pleasure, then what happens is, Krishna talks about it in the 16th chapter, 11th to 15th verses, that that when we start believing sensual, material pleasure or sensual pleasure is the driving purpose of life, then the result of that is that anything that comes in the way of that sensual pleasure can be removed. So Krishna talks about how such people who are sensuous can even become avaricious, they can become greedy, they can become mercenary, they can even become murderous.
So that is unfortunately the trajectory our society has followed, where sensual pleasure, the sexual revolution made sexual freedom as an inviolable right of everyone. And therefore, the consequence of sex, which is having children, that is seen as an inconvenience, as a burden to be dispensed with. So abortion brings technology into the service of humanity or humanity’s baser desires to separate indulgence from consequence or sensuality from the attendant responsibility.
And that’s why there is this vehement insistence on abortion. Just 10 years ago, former American presidents, even Obama and Clinton said abortion should be safe, legal and rare. But now what has happened is, abortion is absolute moral good, New York Times declares.
Or share your story, shout your story. Those are trends on Facebook, where women are told to come out and tell their abortion story, that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in it. Be proud of the fact that you had the courage to do abortion.
So what has happened over here is a slippery slope where by legalizing and making abortion more and more easy, that any checks on it have been removed. And now there is a sense of not just the abortion, allowing abortion as a necessary adjustment for emergencies where a woman is exalted or a woman’s life is in danger. Now abortion is portrayed as if it is an inviolable right.
And not only right, it is something good. So unless we consider something to be good, why would we want to share your story of how you had an abortion? So this is the slippery slope. Yes, what is legal, when something which is involving killing is made legal and readily accessible, this is the slippery slope we go down.
So what is the solution? A spiritual worldview recognizes that human life, we find fulfillment, not by sensual indulgence, but by service. By taking responsibility for caring for others, for improving the quality of life of others, for raising others consciousness and thereby in therein raising our own consciousness. And parenting is a way in which humanity takes responsibility for other human beings and thereby one grows.
And so unfortunately, today, to the extent sex has become glamorized after the sexual revolution, it is something which we all have a right to do and we can do it anytime. Who’s there to stop it? But ironically, with the glamorization of the sex, of sex has come its trivialization that it’s glamorized, it’s fantasized about and then it’s casually indulgent where people have a few drinks and then in the back of a car or in some room somewhere, as John Lennon said that most of the Western world has been conceived in the back of a car after several drinks. He was exaggerating, but it’s not a complete exaggeration.
It’s tragic. So we need to recognize the sanctity and gravity of sex. In the Bhagavad Gita, Dharma vriddho bhuteshu kamosni bharadarshibha.
Krishna says that actually sex provides human beings an opportunity to become co-creators with God in bringing new life into this world. And it is not because of puritanical or moralizing culture that sex is considered to be a private and sanctified activity that was traditionally done or at least recommended and enjoined to be done within the sanctified bond of marriage. Why? Because it is great.
We are bringing new life into the world and the way human race is structured is that human beings, when they are young newborn, they need a lot of care. And for one person to offer that care is difficult. That’s why there is pair bonding.
And a man and a woman come together when they have a child, then that strengthens the bond between them. So not only we need to recognize the sanctity and gravity of sex itself, but also the importance of marriage and the importance of parenting that results from marriage. We humans have a deep need to nurture and when we don’t take care of that need to nurture, when that need to nurture is not taken care of through the natural arrangement of parenting, what happens is that unfortunately people replace it with something else.
And in America, in several major cities, New York, LA, San Francisco, in the Caucasian population, the white population, basically the number of pets has become more than the number of children. What has happened is that we have de-glamorized parenthood, especially motherhood. Oh, it just inconvenience the burden.
In the past, when a mother would not, when a woman would not be able to conceive a child, that’s considered a sad thing. There’s no need to stigmatize the mother. That was unfortunate, but it’s sad.
But now the idea is I am a child-free, not a childless woman. I’m a child-free woman. Well, motherhood is a privilege.
It’s a special gift. So abortion basically uses technology to deprive women of the speciality that nature has given them. You may say, oh, it’s not a speciality, it’s a burden because women have to become pregnant.
Well, yes, every gift comes with some liabilities and it is society that needs to be structured in a way that that is not seen as a liability, but is seen as a gift. So to the extent we can have a spiritual ethos, in the sense that we understand that life is meant for service, life is meant for evolution, life is meant for growing by caring for something beyond ourselves. To that extent, we will start seeing parenting and motherhood, parenthood and law.
It is good that at least abortion is not being seen as a legal right, because when something like killing is made legal, it will become very easily accessible and it will be done nonchalantly. So there have to be restraints on that, but the legal route alone is not the solution. That if simply the solution is seen to be banning abortion and those who are in the situation for whatever reason that they want to abort, they will either have to go to some illegal clinics where their health might be endangered, or they may try to do it alone, on their own, in their bathrooms, and that would be even more dangerous.
So the moral cannot be enforced simply by the legal. Moral changes cannot be made simply by legal changes. But legal changes can make the immoral very easy, and that plug has been stopped to some extent, and in that sense, this move is welcome.
But there need not be any triumphalist tone on the side of the pro-life or an alarmist tone on the side of the pro-choice. This is a serious issue and there are substantial changes socially, not just individually required, and that requires a raising of our consciousness, a re-examination of what brings meaning and purpose to our life. And when we can restore the gravity and sanctity of sex, the sanctity of marriage, and the glory of parenting and mothering, then we will be able to address the causes that make so many people want to consider abortion as an option.
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.