Kristen Gyles | Spectators in the ‘Jamaica’ movie

Sometimes I feel like a spectator in a theatre, watching a never-ending movie called ‘Jamaica’. Scripted by a creative company of politicians, the movie definitely has me on the edge of my seat, but I, like all the other spectators, can only watch and see what will happen next. In ‘Jamaica’, the main characters do strange and complicated things sometimes, but just as with any other movie, no matter how passionately we, the spectators, shout instructions at the movie screen, the characters just don’t seem to hear us. Neither our occasional laughter, nor tears, do anything to change the plot or the direction of the movie. We are just spectators.

In real life, our elected officials run the show, not just figuratively, but literally, because the methodology for making public policy decisions seems to have shifted from one of consensus seeking to a reliance on unilateral personal judgements. The bad news, though, is that we actually aren’t living in a movie and even though we are (apparently) still spectators often watching those in charge do as they please, every single decision affects us ... in real life.

This can’t be what representation looks like.

Last week, an emotive declaration made in parliament by the minister of legal and constitutional affairs perplexed many Jamaicans. She stated that “changing the law for abortion will never be my platform for the simple reason that my mother told me that when she was pregnant with me, at every stage of her pregnancy she was told to abort me”. She added that in honour of her mother, and respect for her own life, she takes a certain position, and that the abortion issue is not hers.

It’s reasonable to expect that an individual’s experience will shape their own personal opinion. No one is strictly objective and unbiased all the time. In fact, it would seem that many, if not most, Jamaicans share the view that was expressed, which more or less, is that a respect for the sanctity of life makes the concept of abortion somewhat unpalatable. No problem there, really.

UNCOMFORTABLE

Where things got uncomfortable was in the ambiguity regarding whether the ‘certain position’ taken by the minister. It was strictly a personal opinion being stated as an alert that she would not be the one to champion the legalisation of abortion. Or it was an indication that as minister she would not permit the legalisation of abortion, in furtherance of that personal opinion. While the minister did not state the latter, it seems to have been the take-away for many, with one news headline explicitly reading “Malahoo Forte vows to never legalise abortion”.

The minister does not need to become an advocate for the legalisation of abortion or any other issue of a controversial nature. But she certainly needs to not get in the way of a democratic process of determining whether abortion should be legalised. It’s just not her decision to make.

National leaders, including elected officials should not be precluded from sharing personal views. After all, they are people like us, with a desire to engage in meaningful discourse and to have a social impact. But the whole point of electing representatives to sit in parliament every ever-so-often is that we expect them to take the time and exercise the diligence to glean public sentiment as a basis for knowing what their constituents need and want. If the prevailing sentiment is that laws criminalising abortion should be left on the books, then so they should. The personal views of any one minister of government only become relevant to the extent that he or she is a citizen of the country.

BACK-SEAT PASSENGERS

When government ministers use their personal views as the basis for national policies, it makes us wonder whether we are actually just back-seat passengers being whisked away by the politicians we voted for, to an undisclosed location instead of to our desired destination as a country.

Abortion is a very contentious topic. There is a lot of passion on both sides of the debate. There are also very reasonable concerns on both sides and consequently, many grey areas. One way of cutting through much of the repetitive and divisive discussion is to simply organise the long-awaited and highly anticipated referendum. The average Jamaican might very well wish to keep the existing laws which criminalise abortion. But again, that decision is not one for a single government minister to make, especially if the basis for the decision is personal experience or religious conviction.

Putting the issue to the people also does not mean that public education can’t be used to spread awareness surrounding specific risks and social or health considerations associated with the issue that people might not be aware of. Prepping the public to make an informed decision also involves sensitising people to the fact that their personal preferences don’t need to be the sole basis of their vote, especially where an issue does not affect them directly. The biggest issue here, in any case, is that most of us tend not to care very much about other people’s problems, even when solving them comes at no cost to us.

Regardless, the majority rules, even over the minority of power-brokering big wigs. That’s at least how it is in an actually democratic society.

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.