The president talks about abortion

President Duque, determined to show that four years in office have not taught him to be president, recently gave his opinion on abortion in a public forum.

"Abortion is not a method of birth control," he said.

“If life begins from conception, interrupting it is an attempt against life itself, because there is no right to abortion.

There is no right to take the life of a being with the expectation of entering society.

After reading the report in the Colombian press, I wanted to find the video of the speech, because it seemed difficult to imagine more mistakes made in the same number of words.

And there is the video: with all the words, with all the mistakes.

In these forty miscounted words there are flaws in logic, synderesis, democratic culture, legal knowledge and simple empathy,

Let's start with the first sentence, one of the most common attacks that women who defend their sovereign right to decide about their bodies and their future must endure.

The president should be told that no, abortion is not a contraceptive method: it is an abortion method.

And to suggest that women make such a difficult decision with the same attitude as taking a pill is intolerably frivolous, even in someone as frivolous as Duque.

Part of the problem with the abortion discussion is this flippancy with which many (usually but not always men) make a decision that is terribly serious, often hurtful and painful, and carried out always, without exception, to avoid further damage:

But I read my words and I wonder if it is true: if anyone can understand that a woman does not want to have the child of the one who has raped her.

And the truth is that no: for Duque or the religious leaders, who not only wanted to annul the last sentence of the Constitutional Court but to penalize any abortion, the State has the right to demand that the raped woman (or the girl: twelve, eleven, ten years old) that mortgages her entire life to a pregnancy she has not decided on, and which is also the result of an act of violence.

I cannot think of a clearer way to tell women (or girls) that they are not really free: because in the society that Duke and the religious leaders would like, any man can define his future existence.

In philosophy we speak of "agency" as the ability of a person to act in the world:

an essential component of freedom.

That is what is stolen from women (or girls) when they are told that someone else's actions can mark their lives forever and that they have no right to prevent it.

What man would want to live in such a society?

And here comes one of the most incomprehensible aspects of this debate on abortion.

Let us return to Duque's speech and to the revelation that interrupting life is an attempt against life, and let us remember that this is usually the first allegation of those who oppose the right that has enshrined the Court's ruling: they say they do it because they are favor of life

And the rest of us are forced to point out that the decision to have an abortion is difficult because there is not one life involved in it, but two, and they are in conflict.

How is this conflict resolved?

It is a very complex conversation, and the first thing to do is respect that complexity (something that the banalities uttered by the president do not do);

the next thing is to recognize that, if having a child implies sacrificing the life of the mother,

the only person who can decide if she is willing to sacrifice is the mother herself.

"We live in a society where many despise life," Duque also said.

But she did not say which life she was referring to.

What he did say, instead, is that there is no right to abortion.

And one could get literal and denounce Duque, president of Colombia, for ignoring a ruling of the Colombian Constitutional Court;

or he could get sarcastic and say that Duke evidently doesn't read the newspapers;

Or he could become cynical and remember that the Duque government recently asked the Court to annul the ruling, even knowing that this legal possibility is almost non-existent (just as it did at the beginning of its mandate with the objections to the JEP: but not let's mix things up).

The truth is that the right to abortion does exist, although the president, due to his personal convictions, would prefer it not to be so, and even if it seems bad to him, as he said after the February ruling, that five people decide on the order of a society .

It seems that he did not go to the Law class where it is explained how a democracy works: yes, few people make decisions that affect us all.

In any case, I do not see that Duque has found it bad that nine other people, those of the Supreme Court of the United States, have recently decided on the order of another society.

About cancellation of

, I haven't heard any complaints from him.

There is much more to comment on the president's words.

Something should be said, for example, about the fact that he pronounced them during a forum to commemorate religious freedom, which seems to confirm something that I have been suspecting for a long time: for a good part of those who fill their mouths with those In other words, religious freedom consists in imposing your own religion on the freedoms of others.

Colombia has always had a serious problem understanding that religious convictions, however respectable they may be, are not a source of law.

That is to say, the religion of some cannot be the foundation of the law of all.

If we do not agree on this, at least we must seriously worry about the future of our secular republic.

And something should also be said about that last of the phrases I have quoted: "There is no right to take the life of a being with the expectation of entering society."

An unborn has no expectations of anything, of course;

the one he does have, and he will see them truncated (sometimes with much suffering) if he is forced to have a child he doesn't want, is the mother.

But if the unborn child had expectations, and especially if she were a woman, she would surely take a look at this society that does not properly defend her from sexual assaults, that blames her for them when they happen to her and does not believe her when she denounces them.

And he would wonder if it is preferable to live in a society like the one that Duque wants or in one like the one allowed by the Court's ruling.

I, in his place, would have a very clear answer.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a writer.

His latest book is

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