As a young Cypriot heralding from a supposedly more enlightened age, I have been left dumbstruck over the recent revelations on the state of “botched” abortions where Cypriot teenagers and young women have been forced to resort to illegal, back-street pharmaceuticals to end an unwanted pregnancy.
I believe anyone who has thought that abortion never occurred on our island all these years is blind. Ever since the “liberalisation” of abortion laws in 1974, thousands of Cypriot women have sought to end unwanted pregnancies, if not in the public sector, then in the private one.
According to details released by the Cypriot Family Planning Association and confirmed by the House Legal Affairs Committee Chairman, Ionas Nicolaou, no woman has ever been prosecuted or indeed imprisoned for proceeding with a termination of pregnancy, even though abortion-on-demand remains technically illegal under the current, out-dated law.
It is now 2009 – three decades after enlightened abortion laws swept across the European continent and over two decades after our own “motherland” Greece legalised abortion on-demand. Despite this, in a country that considers itself “European” and in a society that does all it can to put on a facade of progressiveness and modernisation, I find it deeply angering that Cypriot women – many of them girls of my own generation – are forced to resort to methods of procuring an end to an unwanted pregnancy that most people would expect of women in a Third World country, much less a country that considers itself to be firmly European.
As a European and a Cypriot but above all as a young person, I find it downright abhorrent that in this day and age Cypriot women who do not have the financial means to seek an abortion in a private clinic are forced to use these barbarous methods of terminating a pregnancy.
Abortion, though not often spoken about, is widely practiced in Cyprus (as it is in nearly every country on Earth, be it legal or not). And yet, despite the fact that thousands of girls and young women every year have abortions, despite the fact that to this generation of young people it is a fact of life – albeit an unwanted one – an archaic law remains in place, and results in those of lesser financial means attempting to acquire medication that not only puts their fertility at risk, but in some cases their lives as well.
It is time for the government to update the abortion law, and introduced a clear and modern law in step with those in the rest of Europe, to which we supposedly belong, giving women the right to abortion within the first trimester of pregnancy with restrictions applying after this period.
Together with this, a serious programme of sexual education needs to be implemented in order to ensure that young people are informed as much as possible regarding a wide variety of issues concerning their sexual health, ranging from the danger of unwanted pregnancies to sexually transmitted diseases.
Women and young girls who have abortions – as well as those who decide, as is their right, to continue with an unwanted pregnancy – must be supported, both by their families as well as the state. In my belief a women facing an unwanted pregnancy needs to be given as many options as possible: safe and legal termination of pregnancy, as well as the option of continuing the pregnancy and raising the child with as much support as possible.
Abortion is an issue that affects all young people in some way or another and it is time young people speak out for their rights. If the government, in another showing of how far apart the people in power have grown from the needs and desires of young people across the island, fails to update the law, then all we can expect is that in ever-so-European Cyprus, women, especially young girls who are the most at risk, will continue to have to resort to discrete and dangerous pills bought over the internet or imported from other nations.
If abortion laws are not finally liberalised, justice will have to wait till the day when the people in power now – born in a time unknown and incomprehensible to modern day Cypriots – will die out and their iron grip on power transferred to my own generation.
Lukas Hadjigeorgiou,
Nicosia
