The right to live: Life: a fundamental right.

As a counselor, I get to handle a lot of clients who come with a problem which can be primarily traced to upbringing: dependency. A quality which, unfortunately, the parents are responsible for inculcating in children, when they insist on tying the shoelaces of a child who is quite capable of doing so on his own, when they insist on feeding the child when the child wants to eat on his own, explore, either because they do not want to clear up the mess later, or simply because they feel the child is not ‘old enough’. Such children grow up expecting the world to wait on them, and are unable to be effective problem solvers or decision makers. The parents continue to decide for them, the child keeps riding on their shoulders, thus perpetuating a dysfunctional family when he grows up and has a family of his own.

The parents fail to realize that every child is an individual in his own right. Right from the moment he chooses to be born. Yes, it is now widely accepted that a child chooses his womb, and his choice is based on a variety of lessons and experience that he needs to learn in this lifetime. When a child that is not even born into this world, who, when he is just a soul incapable of even bodily functions, is able to choose, what right do we have, as mere mortals, to decide or override this choice? What is the basis by which we decide whether the child lives or not? The child, like I said earlier, even chooses his parents. And we, self-righteously, decide to reject this; and the child. I remember seeing a film sometime back, when a child overhears his father, who is a police commissioner, declaring to the kidnappers of the child, that he would refuse to buckle to their ransom condition (release of a terrorist, I think I am not very sure). The child manages to escape from the kidnappers and comes back home, but grows to be thoroughly dysfunctional, carrying a chip on his shoulders against his father, who has proved that he chose to reject the child over his principles, and who is perplexed to see why his son has shut him out. He spends his entire career chasing his son who has become an anti-social element, not realizing the role he played in making him so.

What is the thread running here? The right to choose. The right that we deny to our children. The right that is being denied to a young foetus, just six months old. Simply because we decide the foetus does not have the right to choice. The right to decide. And the right to live. I dread to think what the child would go through, if he chooses to live, either with a disability or with all his abilities intact, when he comes to know that his parents rejected him even before he was born. Is he going to become a child with a conduct disorder, or carry with him a feeling of rebuff throughout his life? Will his parents be able to make up for this initial rejection? Just because one of his organs is malfunctioning? Do the parents realize that when they appeal to the law to allow them to abort the unborn child, they are tampering with a higher law? A law that sees no appeal, no petitions in higher courts? We pat ourselves on our back when a test tube baby survives for three decades and do retrospective living. Won’t the child do the same? What will he live through then? The society going down on bended knees before him will not erase the hurt in his mind then, unless he turns out to be elevated souls, and then we will have enough more to contend with!

Can we include an eighth fundamental right in the constitution? A Right to Life…

Mohana Narayanan
August 5, 2008