Birth and No-Birth

Hanamatsuri, the celebration of the Buddha’s birth, is a time for temples to celebrate children. The hanamatsuri service begins with a parade of o-chigo, children dressed as lords and ladies of ancient Japan, and at some temples the service includes or is followed by children’s music and dance performances. Another time when children are celebrated is at the Hatsu Mairi (official “first visit”) ceremony, the Buddhist equivalent of a christening, where the parents of newborns and toddlers pledge to raise their children with respect to the Three Treasures.

While we celebrate birth and children, I think Buddhists should also discuss the matter of no-birth. It has happened to many people, mostly in a private way – the loss of a fetus that was growing in the womb but never made it to birth as a child. It happens involuntarily as a miscarriage but it also happens as a decision to abort.

In the early 1990s I was asked to be a speaker for a Young Buddhist Association conference in Southern California. At one of the planning meetings, the minister who was the main conference speaker told the young adults that one of his occasional duties while he was studying in Japan was to escort teenage girls to and from an abortion clinic. These were the daughters of temple-going Japanese Americans who had the means to send their girls to Japan for a quick discreet abortion. But after telling the kids about this, the minister went on to advise them to campaign against legal abortions in the U.S. because “as Buddhists we are against the taking of life.”

I was shocked that he said this and I had to respond: Even though Buddhism is against the taking of life, there are circumstances where have to kill, such as taking the lives of animals and plants for our food. One young man then put his hands up at his sides to pantomime a balance scale. “You mean, on one hand, the value of a human baby,” he said, “is equal – on the other hand – to a hamburger?” The kids all busted out laughing and agreed with the main minister that my pro-choice argument was ridiculous.

Maybe I should’ve talked about how killing was acceptable to Japanese American Buddhists because our heroes had to murder fellow human beings. The soldiers of the 442^nd battalion had to kill scores of Germans in the fierce European battles and the Military Intelligence Service interpreters by intercepting Japanese messages helped the U.S. to target and exterminate Japanese troops, some of who might have been relatives of the MIS soldiers. Up through today there are Japanese Americans who identify as Buddhist who as soldiers, police, border patrol etc. have had to kill human beings as part of their duties.

[In Japan, Jizo bodhisattva statues symbolize the spirits of dead children]

In Japan there is the tradition of Buddhist memorial services for “mizuko,” unborn children, and although some proportion of mizuko are miscarriages, probably most are aborted fetuses. In one of his Dharma talks in Japanese, Rev. Yukei Ashikaga (the former head minister in Chicago, now retired in Japan) said he has performed some mizuko memorial services. It was usually for young Japanese who came to the U.S. to study. Rev. Ashikaga understood their circumstances – with limited financial resources and the obligation to concentrate on their studies, the students were in no position to have and raise a child. Even now there is one couple who annually send a donation from Japan to the temple for conducting a memorial service for their unborn child.

Recently this issue of abortion rights came to my mind when I attended meeting of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. We split up into groups interested in particular campaigns and I joined the group working on the repeal of PNA, the Illinois law requiring parents to be notified before a minor can have an abortion http://www.napawf.org/chapters/chicago. In the office where we gathered, there was a flip chart page on the wall titled “Religion.” It had a long list of items that religions cite to condemn women who have abortions, such as “women’s duty is to have children” and patriarchal rule (men in control). I had to tell the group, “No, that’s not Buddhism!”

So I’m writing this article to explain why Buddhism respects and in no way condemns the women who have chosen or are considering abortion. First of all, we don’t need to debate “when does life start?” because Buddhism recognizes that our existence at this very moment is the result of eons of causes and conditions through many generations and geographical locations. One’s birth father and birth mother met through an uncountable variety of circumstances and even they themselves wouldn’t be able to explain fully what led them to conceiving a child.

Bringing a child into this world entails more than the physical act of giving birth. The mother and usually the father and the families of both have to consider if they have the resources to raise the child in a nurturing, safe setting. I admire the church my cousin attends in North Carolina for taking an active role in finding appropriate homes for the children of unwed mothers as part of their anti-abortion campaign, but in most cases the Christian groups who oppose abortion feel no obligation to help the individual babies born to parents unable to care for them.

In Buddhism we learn that none of us is in a position to judge others since there is so much about another’s circumstances that we can never know. The most we can do is express our view that a particular action may be destructive to the network of lives, but we cannot condemn a whole person for taking the particular action that we disagree with. When we examine ourselves, we know there’s a lot we’ve done which was regrettable and we would hate other to condemn us for those mistakes. And sometimes we know those actions were not mistakes but the best option that seemed available at the time. So looking at others, we need to give them the same leeway we want others to give us.

In the Chicago Reader interview of Paula Kamen, playwright of “Jane: Abortion and the Underground,” she reminds us that abortion is not a binary issue of childbirth versus choice because many women who’ve had to choose abortion have had or went on to have children that they were able to adequately care for. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/jane-and-roe-wade-into-the-history-of-abortion-rights/Content?oid=77410178 In the recent article in the Guardian, we see that couples have to choose abortion when the society they live in doesn’t support them in raising children in a safe, healthy setting. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/05/pregnancy-vermont-paid-parental-leave-abortion-difficult-decision

As many pro-choice activists say, if you’re against abortion, don’t have one, but please don’t restrict the options for people who don’t have the resources you enjoy. As Buddhists we do all we can to enhance and promote life, but we recognize there are circumstances where people have had to kill a living being. To those who had to terminate a pregnancy, we send out thought-waves of compassion. We don’t have to understand why they had to do what they did but we respect them as whole persons and give them our non-judgmental support.