‘Nakuomba Nerea, usitoe mimba yangu.
Mungu akileta mtoto, analeta sahani yake...’
This is the catch to ‘Nerea’, a Sauti Sol song featuring Amos and Josh. Evidently, they( I’m not sure who exactly amongst them got Nerea pregnant, pun intended) are pleading with Nerea, not to procure an abortion, begging for a chance to be heard. I feel this guy. This part of the song gets my eyes wet. So I logged into my Twitter to tweet my excitement and appreciation of this new jam. But alas! (Haha! Did I just use that?) Hundreds of women were hating on this particular part of the song, saying ‘Sauti Sol are trying to dictate that a man should decide whether or not a woman should have an abortion.’ Aaai, now why do you just decide to lie? It is clear that the man in this song is humbly begging the woman to heed his advice. Not coercing. Or using any other negative means to get his way. I believe a man should not have legal right to decide whether an abortion is to happen or not, but at least he should be granted the opportunity to be heard? It would be extremely unfair to totally shut him out of a process that largely includes termination of his child. His opinion matters, but at the end of the day the final decision is to be made by the woman.
‘Huenda akawa Obama, atawale Amerika
Huenda akawa Lupita, Oscar nazo akashinda…’
This is where I have a problem. This part and all the rest that suggest possibilities of the child’s future as reasons why an abortion should not happen. Nimekataa.
Your unborn child owes the world nothing. Not the presidency, not an Olympics gold medal, not an Oscar. Absolutely nothing. Same way the world owes you nothing. The decision whether or not to procure an abortion should not under any circumstance be based on whether or not my baby has a chance of becoming Uhuru Kenyatta or not. The world can do without another Uhuru Kenyatta, or Obama or Rudisha. It can survive. It will survive. With or without your child. So Sauti Sol you are saying that if I have an abortion a time is coming when Kenya will miss a chance at winning the Olympics because apparently I terminated the only man who could have brought the medal home?
The way you bring up your child, the values you instill in him, the environment in which you nurture him plays a role in how he turns out, though not entirely because I have seen kids whose parents have gone through sweat and blood to set them straight yet they still grew up to be total strangers, setting the perfect example of a failed life. Maybe what an individual turns out to be is inborn, maybe not. It is a long scale of possibilities.
So Sauti Sol you are not entirely correct. That baby could be the next Rudisha but could as well be the next Pastor Kanyari, trading salvation for wealth. Or he may be the next Onyancha, who toured police officers around Thika to proudly showcase bodies of people he had murdered in cold blood. Your decision whether or not to have an abortion cannot be purely based on prospective possibilities of your child’s future. You might be disappointed.
I strongly believe that whatever decision we make at this moment, is exactly what we want at this particular time, and somehow our life adjusts itself to accommodate that new choice. You might reach a point where you ask what should have been, that maybe things would have been different. But maybe ‘different’ could have been worse. I’ll share these two;
- ‘Perhaps everything is just as simple and just as infinitely complex as the processes that make a particular leaf fall at a particular moment. That point has been reached, that’s all. It has to happen, and it does happen.’ John Ajvide Lindqvist.
- ‘The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.’ Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life.
Think about it…
