Carol’s Column

Can morality ever justify this suffering?

Last week, a Cape Town newspaper published a heartbreaking picture of a tiny baby girl. Just two weeks old, she was found in a plastic bag on a rubbish dump in Philippi, a poorer suburb of Cape Town.

Fortunately, a local, Francis Gagui, walking past, heard a sound, opened the bag and found the unfortunate baby.

Gagui named her Nosiphino and hugging her for warmth, she took the infant to the Red Cross Children's Hospital where she immediately received emergency treatment.

Today Nosiphino is slowly getting stronger and will eventually be put in a children's placement centre.

If she is lucky, she will be adopted. That's if she is not HIV-positive.

I say this because it is difficult to find adoptive or foster parents for all abandoned babies and those mites who are HIV-positive literally have no chance at all.

On the same day, there was another picture of a 2-year-old boy called Siposethu.

His young mother had dropped him at another hospital for treatment. The staff recollected she seemed desperate. She never returned.

Today, Siposethu, a beautiful child, waits with 12 other babies and toddlers at the centre for somebody to take him home and love him as all small children should be loved.

The dedicated staff at the home do their best, but with so many children abandoned, it is difficult to give a child as much individual attention as he or she craves and deserves.

I tell you this story because a few days later, while driving to work I heard a heated discussion about abortion on a talk radio show.

The pro-lifers vociferously condemned abortion. The word they repeatedly used to describe abortion was immoral. They described abortion as the murder of an unborn foetus.

There was also serious discussion about the infringement of the human rights of the foetus. Again and again, the word immoral was used as condemnation.

I accept that several religions condemn abortion and regard the removal of an unwanted foetus as murder. If people believe this, it is their right. Just as it is my right to believe this is not so.

However, to use the word immoral to describe the act of a woman making a decision that she would rather remove an unwanted foetus, for whatever reason, is obscene.

What is immoral in every way is that so many unwanted children are born. That any desperate woman should give birth to a child she cannot support or does not want, is immoral.

These things are far more immoral than the act of removing a foetus from the womb of a mother who makes that choice.

The fact that Nosiphino, Siposethu and millions of children worldwide grow up unloved in abject misery and poverty because they are not wanted, or their mothers are too poor to keep them, is immoral.

Today, jobs are hard to come by. For any mother without a support system, work is virtually impossible to find. For a poor, unskilled mother with a baby on her back, there is no employment. Without work, there is no food on the table. That these mothers and children starve, is immoral.

When I heard a listener propounding his views about the sanctity of the life of an unborn foetus, I thought he either misunderstood the meaning of the word morality, or somewhere along the line, he had his priorities wrong.

The reality is that at the Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town, a tiny child called Nosiphino is fighting for survival. She deserves better.

To bring an unwanted child into the world is immoral. That any innocent child should suffer is immoral.

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