Peter Espeut | Poor public policy research, CAPRI

Last week, the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI) published a report titled, ‘The Cost of Unequal Access to Safe Abortions in Jamaica’. In my view, this study has not made a meaningful contribution to the abortion debate, and its recommendations have serious and damaging public policy implications not considered or discussed in the report.

The report made only three recommendations:

1. A secret conscience vote should be held in the Jamaican Parliament to repeal sections 72 and 73 of the Offences Against the Person Act.

2. Minors should be able to access reproductive health services, including abortion, without parental involvement.

3. Termination of pregnancy services should be publicly funded.

The Jamaican Constitution does not allow parliamentarians to vote in secret. In both the lower and upper houses of Parliament, the business of the nation is conducted with transparency. Permitting secret votes would allow the passing of legislation supporting corruption, and the public would not know which politicians supported it.

If CAPRI is seriously recommending secret parliamentary voting as public policy, then their report should discuss the pros and cons of this course of action. In my view, secret votes in Parliament are undemocratic, reduce transparency, and are poor public policy. CAPRI’s recommendation should be rejected.

In Jamaican law, parents are responsible for the upbringing and support of their minor children, and parental consent is legally required in almost every area of a child’s life. Removing sexual behaviour of children from the purview of parents’ decision-making obstructs parental responsibility, and is damaging to the institution of the family. The Jamaican family needs to be strengthened rather than weakened.

Poorly thought out

If CAPRI is seriously recommending a reduction in the authority of parents over their children as public policy, they should have discussed the implications of this at length in their report. In my view, this recommendation by CAPRI is very poor public policy; it creates an overbearing state that intrudes between parents and the upbringing up of their children. What will come next? CAPRI’s recommendation should be rejected.

And therefore CAPRI’s report should be rejected as poorly thought out.

In this report, CAPRI makes no effort to debate the morality or otherwise of abortion. It offers an economistic argument: since illegal abortions have a high economic cost, abortions should be legalised. The religious faith of economic fundamentalists prescribes that the demands of economics alone must decide public policy. If you don’t care for religious fundamentalism, you are unlikely to be attracted to economic fundamentalism.

I say that this CAPRI study has not made a meaningful contribution to the abortion debate because it does not address the issues that anti-abortion advocates raise, for example, whether the tissue which is aborted is human life. The report studiously avoids this question.

Sometimes I wonder whether economists believe that their discipline is the only science; the biological sciences – especially genetics and embryology – are quite clear that the foetus is a separate human being from the moment of conception, with different DNA from each parent, and maybe even a different blood type.

The review of the literature is flawed because it fails to at least alert the readers and the policymakers that these issues exist which might influence the public policy decision.

There is no such thing as a “safe abortion”, as the study claims. A human being always dies.

The report states: “Unsafe abortion is a significant and yet highly preventable cause of death” (page 18). This is a nonsense statement, because all abortions are a cause of death.

By categorising abortion as a “reproductive health issue” the study brands a pregnant woman as diseased, and the foetus growing inside her as no better than a cancerous tumour to be excised. This is not valid science, and the study sounds more like a feminist harangue than a serious objective study.

Pregnancy is the result of a woman exercising her right to choose – to have sexual intercourse. “Early sexual debut” is not defined as a public policy problem (see page 10); in fact “sexual intercourse below the age of consent” is not stated to be a public policy problem; the problem is that girls have unwanted pregnancies, and CAPRI’s approach is not to address the cause of the problem, but to help the girls avoid the consequences of their personal choice – poor public policy again.

In my view this study is not CAPRI’s best work; it is poor science, and poor policy research. The management needs to step up their quality control, lest the hitherto good reputation of CAPRI is irreparably damaged.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.