I have come to the conclusion that there are far more women in Singapore who had gone for at least one abortion, than can be accounted for in statistical surveys on the issue.

I am thinking not only of the many young girls, many of them in their teens, who take advantage, sometimes repeatedly, of the generally liberal official stance towards abortion (a private practitioner cheerfully tells me that he performs numerous abortions a month on schoolgirls, without their parents ever finding out). I am thinking of at least three of my friends, all highly educated, two very devout Christians, who confided that they had ‘no choice’ but to end an unwanted pregnancy. For two of them, the pregnancy was the result of a romantic liaison; for the third, it came at the most inconvenient time, a job posting to another country.

One of them felt so guilty that she had to do something to get rid of that corrosive emotion which was threatening to affect her career at the top of the media business. She decided to go through a period of mourning for the aborted fetus, with all the paraphernalia of that ritual. Every morning, she lit a joss stick in a tiny urn on a small altar where she had placed a pair of white baby bootees; every morning, for a month, she wore black to the office. She told me she felt so much better after that month of mourning. ‘I had a dream,’ she said, ‘where I heard a small voice say, ‘Mummy, it’s okay, I’m alright.’ You have no idea about my relief and joy when I woke up!’

When I was a young girl, I would often hang around to listen to the conversations carried on by my mother and the women in the neighbourhood. I am positive that much of what I had heard and been puzzled by, had to do with the abortions that were almost routine in an age when women’s primary role was to bear children, a time well before artificial birth control. I heard snatches of conversation (before I was invariably shooed away by my mother) by which I concluded that beer, unripe pineapple and pellets of opium were effective means to dislodge those unwanted babies in the womb.

Among my mother’s friends was a middle-aged lady whom we called ‘Auntie Nonya’, who seemed to be the expert consultant on abortion (she had herself terminated all but three of her numerous pregnancies). Over the years, as I later learnt as an adult, she had helped in the disposal of hundreds of fetuses, without asking for anything in return except the lighting of a joss-stick ‘to give peace to the little spirit’.

The details could be gruesome: in addition to the beer, pineapple and opium, there had sometimes to be a chopstick or a long knitting needle. If all failed, the special services (very costly) of a certain Malay woman who lived in a nearby kampong could be recruited. I remember my mother once talking about a neighbour’s abortion, successfully performed on the floor of her bathroom, where the fetus was seen to make a quivering movement before it was washed away with a bucket of water into a drain next to the bathroom. My mother said that the woman was so grateful to Auntie Nonya that she immediately sent over a gift of a pair of fowls.

Did Auntie Nonya feel any guilt about the many abortions she had conducted on herself and others? According to my mother, she coped with it by doing a cleansing ritual. She would go on a purely vegetarian diet, abstaining from meat and all meat products such as lard, in addition to going daily to the temple to offer prayers. The ritual would last a week, after which Auntie Nonya was ready to go back to the old activity which she described, as ‘really no more than us women helping each other to cope with our problems.’

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...