By Horace Palacio: The hardest conversation in Belize came back this week.
A report from the Belize Family Life Association called for decriminalizing abortion. A Church Senator answered with the Church’s unwavering opposition. And within hours, the two oldest armies in this debate had taken up their familiar positions, placards high, voices higher.
This column does not run from hard subjects, but it enters this one under special rules, and I ask you to accept them before reading on. Lower your voice. On one side of this question stand people protecting women they love. On the other stand people protecting children they believe in. Both are guarding something sacred to them, and nothing I write today will mock either. What I will do is what this column always does. Put the facts on the table, both cases at full strength, and the verdict where it belongs.
Start with a revelation that will surprise most readers on both sides.
Abortion is not flatly illegal in Belize, and it has not been since 1980.
Open the Criminal Code and read what is actually there. A pregnancy may lawfully be terminated by a registered medical practitioner when two registered doctors agree, in good faith, that continuing it would risk the woman’s life, or injure the physical or mental health of the woman or of her existing children. The law even instructs that account may be taken of the woman’s actual or reasonably foreseeable environment, her real circumstances. A further ground exists where there is substantial risk the child would be born with serious physical or mental disabilities. Outside those grounds, the penalties are severe, running from fourteen years to life imprisonment. And one silence is total. Rape and incest appear nowhere in the law as grounds. A thirteen-year-old victim of the worst crime imaginable has no named provision of her own.
So understand what our shouting match actually is. Belize settled the absolute question nearly half a century ago, quietly, in statute. We have been waging a forty-five-year war over a law that almost none of the combatants have read.
Now the second revelation, the gap between that paper and this country.
On paper, grounds exist. In practice, ask any honest doctor or any honest woman. Stigma is a wall. Providers willing to act under the law are few and unadvertised. There is no published pathway, no clarity, no dignity in the process. And so the law splits, as laws in Belize so often do, into the two ledgers this column has documented all year. The woman with money crosses the border, where Mexico’s courts have decriminalized abortion and its states, including those touching ours, now permit it legally. The woman without money takes the other road, the clandestine one, the dangerous one. Our restriction, like every restriction this column has ever audited, binds only the poor.
And here is the fact that should embarrass every camp equally. The last year Belize published official abortion statistics was 1996. That year recorded 2,603 abortions, and the condition ranked among the leading causes of hospitalization in the country, with estimates from that era attributing roughly one in seven maternal deaths to unsafe procedures. Since then, thirty years of silence. No numbers on legal terminations approved. No numbers on hospital admissions from unsafe ones. No numbers on the dead. Whatever position you hold tonight, you are holding it in the dark, on data older than most of the women this debate is about.
With the room now lit, both cases, at full strength.
The case for reform, as its advocates make it. The principle, they argue, was conceded in 1980, so the remaining fight is about honesty and access, not absolutes. Criminalization, the world’s evidence suggests, does not end abortion, it ends safe abortion, driving the same numbers underground where the poor pay in blood. Penalties of fourteen years to life deter licensed doctors, never desperation. The rape and incest silence is indefensible to them on its face. And a region in motion, Mexico decriminalizing beside us, the United States returning the question to its states, means Belizean reality is already porous, and only Belizean law pretends otherwise.
The case for the church’s position, at equal strength. For the believer, and for many beyond the pews, the unborn child is a distinct human life, and no public health statistic on earth answers a moral claim, you do not repeal a wrong by making it safer. Our own Constitution opens by acknowledging the supremacy of God, and the churches making this stand are the same churches feeding and schooling this nation daily, consistency this column has credited before. They watch other countries where a narrow health ground widened, year by year, into abortion on demand, and if Belizeans do not want that destination, they are entitled to guard the road. And they offer their own answer to desperation, support the mother, fund the crisis centers, strengthen adoption, because a society is better measured by the crises it prevents than by how efficiently it resolves them. Above all, they insist, a change this deep belongs to the people, never to elites, courts, or imported slogans.
Both cases, honestly stated. And now, the four demands that both camps should be able to sign tonight, because each one serves truth before it serves either side.
One, end the data blackout. Thirty years without numbers is not neutrality, it is negligence. Publish, annually, the legal terminations approved, the hospital admissions from unsafe procedures, the maternal outcomes. The Glass Year doctrine applies to the hardest subjects most of all. No nation can legislate what it refuses to measure.
Two, administer the law we already have, honestly. Whatever Parliament meant in 1980, a statute that functions only for the informed and the connected, while remaining a dead letter for the poor, is the single position in this entire debate that nobody defends. Publish the pathway. Define the process. Give it review and dignity. Enforce the law as written, whichever side that discomforts.
Three, attack the causes together. Contraception access, honest education, real support for mothers in crisis, childcare, adoption that works. This is the one agenda the placards on both sides can fund jointly, because every crisis pregnancy prevented is a victory in both camps’ arithmetic.
And four, let the people decide the rest. The elective question, whether Belize should go further than 1980, is exactly the kind of deep moral question this column has argued must never be settled by decree or by imported culture war. Put it through a structured national conversation, honestly informed by the data demand number one finally provides, and let Belizeans choose as Belizeans.
Here is my closing, and it is addressed to both armies with equal respect.
You are each protecting someone real. The woman in the dark. The child unborn. Honor that in each other.
But know this. The current arrangement, an unread law, unequal access, thirty years of hidden numbers, and slogans borrowed from other people’s countries, protects neither of them.
Lower the placards, Belize. Light the room. Read the law.
Then decide, as only a free people can.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post The abortion debate returned this week, and almost nobody in it has read the law appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: The hardest conversation in Belize came back this week. A report from the Belize Family Life Association called for decriminalizing abortion. A Church Senator answered with the Church’s unwavering opposition. And within hours, the two oldest armies in this debate had taken up their familiar positions, placards high, voices higher. This column
The post The abortion debate returned this week, and almost nobody in it has read the law appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.