“Of all the rights of a woman, the greatest is to be a mother.” Lin Yutang
We are constantly bombarded by the issue of abortion, especially around election time where the current administration believes it can win the women’s vote by using abortion as a banner. They want to sell it to us as the issue of women’s right to procreate, a fact that abortion limits them.
Abortion is the right that a woman has to eliminate the possibility of carrying a child in her womb until the moment of birth where she can hold a small human being in all her splendor in her arms.
I don’t want to turn this comment into a criticism of abortion. It is undoubtedly a painfully personal decision that each woman must make according to her circumstances. Since the change in Roe vs. Wade, where each state determines the time allowed, we have seen it fluctuate between 6 to 15 weeks, where the woman can make the irreversible decision to put an end to the growth of that small being that forms inside the womb. she.
Even so, abortion defenders have wanted to extend it until later months, when the child is practically formed. Whether it is seven or nine months, it is not a reproductive right, it is the right to end a life no matter how short or advanced it may be.
My purpose is not to enter into the issue of abortion, but I cannot stop thinking about it after listening to the testimony of the former politician Nely Rojas when she was arrested in Cuba at the age of 19 in the 1960s.
As a result of the arrest, her menstruation began and when she asked for something to contain it, they responded: “fix it as best you can.” That’s how it was, and that young woman who was not allowed to clean herself for days from the shock of that tragic experience, she missed her menstruation for years. She is one of many who, after that long stay in prison, found it extremely difficult to get pregnant. She achieved it, others lost the opportunity to be mothers like Cary Roque after 16 years in prison, Ana Lázara Rodríguez, Clara Berta Cantón, Gloria Agudín, María Caridad Gutiérrez and many more.
Others, like beasts, have come out to defend their children. Always on these dates I think of Clara Abraham Boitel sleeping on the outskirts of the prison while her son Pedro Luis Boitel was dying on a hunger strike. Also in Reina Luisa Tamayo fighting for her son, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who was already dying, the state security told her mother that they would give her a kidney transplant and she denounced it from Cuba here on my program in Miami. I think about them and so many others who before and now denounce the situation of their sons and daughters in prison.
I listen to the direct voice of Migdalia Gutiérrez, crying out for the safety of her son Brusnelvis Cabrera, alone, on the street in front of the Directorate of Penitentiary Establishments of the Ministry of the Interior with a banner in hand, harassed by a hitman telling her: “I’m going to kill you.” make it more difficult”.
Those are the Cuban mothers today and they have always been. Those who have buried their shot children, the one who had no body to bury because her son, her raftsman, was swallowed by the sea. To those who have suffered the pain of childbirth and every anguish that their children have suffered.
Congratulations on this day to all the mothers, to those who chose to give life to a human being as the true right of reproduction. With joys and hardships, they could not take away the determination to be mothers because a political party convinced them that abortion is the solution.
