An Opportunity for Indonesia?

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abortion, Christian-majority, ensoulment, extremism, floating markets, fundamentalism, Hanafi school, Hanbali school, Indonesia, Islam, Joko Widodo, maternal mortality, microfinancing, Muslim-majority, pluralism, Shafi'i school, tolerance, Trump, United States

The New York Times recently published an article titled “With Joko Widodo’s Re-election Indonesia Bucks Global Tilt Toward Strongmen.” Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, just as the U.S. is the largest Christian-majority country. But while the U.S. head of state is a narcissist and compulsive liar who is taking his country in the direction of fundamentalism and intolerance and giving aid and comfort to extremists around the world, Indonesia’s leader is a moderate, self-effacing reformer who favors a syncretic, locally-inflected version of Islam and equal rights for women and ethnic minorities.

President Widodo’s cabinet of 34 boasts eight women, including the Foreign Minister and the Finance Minister, and he supports microfinancing programs that benefit large numbers of women in the informal sector — small traders, farmers, and market gardeners, such as the sellers in the floating market pictured below.
 

Indonesia’s Lok Baintan Floating Market

President Widodo is far from perfect — he’s a politician, after all, and is no stranger to the vacillations and reversals characteristic of the breed. But observers are cautiously optimistic. He no longer has to worry about re-election, and has a fairly strong mandate for reform, since he defeated a right-wing Muslim fundamentalist on a platform of fostering pluralism.

Despite President Widodo’s opponent’s claims that Widodo’s platform is a betrayal of Islam, in fact it reflects the dominant beliefs and practices of Islam throughout its history. For example, Moorish (Muslim) Spain was an intellectually vibrant and religiously tolerant region for centuries. Only with the ascendancy of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella did Jews, Muslims, and other non-Catholics face persecution and expulsion from the realm.

Islamic traditions of tolerance have also extended to women’s reproductive concerns. As I explain in the first chapter of my book, Sex and Herbs and Birth Control, the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence (historically the most influential interpreters of Islamic principles) accepts abortion until ensoulment, which for them takes place 120 days after conception. Other schools of jurisprudence, such as the Shafi’i and Hanbali, have debated when ensoulment occurs, but traditionally Islamic jurists never put it earlier than 40 days after conception. Thus, abortion before this time was no one’s business but the woman’s, and abortion has been widely practiced and condoned throughout the Muslim world from the time of Mohammed.

Since 2009, the only circumstances in which abortion is legal in Indonesia are to save the life/health of the pregnant woman, or (up to six weeks) in the case of rape. Of course, as in many (if not most) countries with restrictive abortion laws, illegality has little effect on frequency. Estimates are that approximately two million illegal abortions are performed in Indonesia each year. Although complications from illegal abortions are estimated to cause about 16% of all maternal deaths, it is interesting to note that an Indonesian woman is twice as likely to die in childbirth as from an illegal abortion.

President Widodo could enhance his reputation as a friend of women and opponent of fundamentalist extremism if he joined Indonesian health rights advocates in pressing for liberalization of abortion laws. That way, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country could honor the pluralistic, women-friendly traditions of mainstream Islam, while casting further into relief the misogynistic and backward-looking policies of the Christian-majority U.S.

The Outrage of El Salvador

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abortion, abortion laws, anti-abortion movement, El Salvador, fundamentalism, human rights, misogyny, reproductive health

Maira Veronica Figueroa Marroquin (center) released after 15 years in prison

The government and legislature of El Salvador have once again shown their blatant disregard for women’s health and wellbeing by adjourning without voting on proposals to weaken the country’s draconian anti-abortion law. El Salvador is one of the remaining five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to completely ban abortion under all circumstances. The situation is made even worse for women because the law is enforced with exceptional severity and arbitrariness.

In mid-April 2018 the Spanish-language cable network Univision aired a segment on “Primer Impacto” chronicling Salvadoran women’s rights activists’ attempts to get justice for women imprisoned under the law. At least two dozen women who suffered miscarriages or stillbirths late in pregnancy while not under a doctor’s care (in other words, women from the impoverished majority of the population) were initially charged with abortion, a crime bearing a sentence of up to eight years for both the woman and the abortionist. But prosecutors wound up getting the women charged and convicted of aggravated homicide, and they were sent to prison for up to thirty years. Protests by feminist and human rights organizations within El Salvador and throughout the world have succeeded in freeing five of the incarcerated women. But so far the Salvadoran government and judiciary have refused to review most of the cases. Meanwhile, the proposals to grant exceptions to the ban on abortion when the woman’s life is in danger or when a minor is pregnant as a result of rape have once again been stymied.

The bitter ironies in the Salvadoran situation are many. The tiny, densely-populated country has been experiencing an unprecedented upswing in violent criminal activity, in part because of deportations from the U.S. of Salvadoran gang members from Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and elsewhere (young men born in El Salvador but reared and introduced to crime in the U.S.), and in part because of the large numbers of ex-military and ex-paramilitary individuals left unemployed after the end of the U.S.-bankrolled counter-insurgency war against earlier movements for social justice and national liberation. Yet the government seems more concerned with policing women’s bodies and enforcing one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the world than in trying to control criminal violence.

Another irony: Salvadoran anti-abortion fanatics have had the unmitigated gall to portray supporters of weakening the anti-abortion law as being under the influence of foreigners. The reality is that worldwide most of the funding of the most strident anti-abortionists comes from Catholic or Protestant fundamentalist organizations based in the U.S. The present Salvadoran outright prohibition is only twenty years old and was enacted in 1998 at the instigation of U.S.-based anti-abortion groups. Earlier Salvadoran anti-abortion legislation was not as sweeping, and enforcement was not so vicious.

In the early to mid-1990s it was possible to have discussions of the harmful public health consequences of illegally induced abortion without participants being intimidated and shouted down by anti-abortion zealots. I myself attended conferences in 1993 and 1994 in San Salvador at which speakers addressed the lack of sex education in Salvadoran schools, the horrible consequences for women’s health of abortion under unsafe conditions, the enormous costs to Salvadoran taxpayers, the need for freely distributed contraception, the injustice of safe clandestine abortions being available to affluent but not to ordinary women, and Salvadoran indigenous women’s use of native plants for abortifacient purposes. These conferences were well-attended and well-publicized, and both were co-sponsored by the Salvadoran Women Doctors’ Association. But by the late-1990s throughout Central America the situation had changed. Anti-abortion fanatics, largely funded by U.S.-based organizations, increasingly made it their business to harass legislators, gynecologists, and women’s health clinic personnel. The atmosphere of belligerence and intimidation has deterred many doctors from performing abortions in circumstances in which they would have had no qualms about performing them in the days before the anti-abortion zealots became so threatening. In the words of the independent legislator who proposed one of the bills that would have softened the ban, “There is a lot more tolerance for corruption than there is for discussion on abortion.”

And so the outrage continues. Groups of self-righteous misogynists directed from the U.S. hypocritically and sanctimoniously proclaim their love of (embryonic) life, while Salvadoran women die from clandestine abortions under unsafe conditions, and at least twenty Salvadoran women languish in prison because they couldn’t afford doctors to bear witness to their miscarriages.

Fond Memories of My Catholic Education

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Affordable Care Act, Catholic Church, contraception, fundamentalism, high school education, Sisters of Notre Dame, Supreme Court

When I talk with students in my Women as Healers classes about their time in Catholic high school compared to mine forty-five years earlier, we are shocked by how much our experiences diverge. Ironically, it is I rather than they who has the fond memories. In fact, the more I hear their distressing stories of hidebound, doctrinaire priests and nuns, the more I have come to appreciate my own teachers at the Academy of the Holy Angels in northeastern New Jersey, and to marvel at how sophisticated and open-minded they were, in contrast to the religious fundamentalism of many of today’s Catholic school teachers.

My nuns were Sisters of Notre Dame, an order not particularly known for progressive tendencies. Indeed, if the school or the order had had a liberal reputation, my conservative-leaning parents would never have sent me there. But I realize now (much more than I did at the time) that the nuns took a truly catholic (in the best sense of the word) approach to learning. We read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and even Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy (1963). Performances of The Deputy — which portrayed Pope Pius XII as complicitous in the Nazi Holocaust — were being picketed by conservative Catholics, but the play was required reading in my high school English class. Our film study class included Woman in the Dunes, Roshomon, La Dolce Vita, Pather Panchali, and the Soviet classics Mother and Ballad of a Soldier. The religious observances on the first Friday of every month were only sometimes actual Catholic masses. As often as not the service was presided over by clerics of other denominations: Episcopalian and other Protestant ministers, Greek Orthodox priests, Jewish rabbis, Buddhist monks, even on one occasion a Muslim iman.

I attended my all-girls Catholic high school from 1965 to 1969, which was a vibrant time in the history of the Church. My nuns had fully embraced what was often called “the spirit of Vatican II” — the open, tolerant, progressive climate which was encouraged by Pope John XXIII and which continued for several years after his death in 1963. This was a time when many sensitive issues were discussed: female ordination, a possible softening of the Church stance on birth control and even abortion, a “preferential option for the poor” (that is, liberation theology as espoused by the Catholic bishops at the Medellín conference in 1968).

Pope John XXIII in 1959

I remember once the father of one of my classmates, a gynecologist, was brought in to speak to the seniors. He told us that while he himself as a good Catholic could not prescribe contraceptives for his patients, he had no objection to referring them to colleagues who he knew would fulfill the women’s requests for birth control. His belief that he should not impose his religious convictions on his patients (and our nuns’ tacit approval of his position) stand in stark contrast to the stance of present-day officials of Wheaton College and other evangelical Protestants and Catholics who protest against the contraceptive provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The recent decision of the US Supreme Court granting Wheaton College the right to refuse even to give a referral to a student desiring contraception caused me to recall this Catholic doctor’s visit to our school and to think nostalgically of a time when religious fundamentalism and extremism were much less widespread and influential in the U.S. than they are now.