TEMPLES HELP JAPANESE ASSUAGE ABORTION REGRETS.

Byline: Sheryl WuDunn The New York Times

Winding her way among thousands of tiny statuettes in an ancient hillside temple, Yuka Sugimoto finds the one she is seeking and lingers in contemplation of the secret act that brought her here.

Many Buddhists come to temples to pray for good health, a new husband or money, but not Sugimoto. Every month she comes to this temple in the ancient Japanese capital of Kamakura to make amends for the abortion she had nearly two years ago as an unmarried student.

It is not that she broods over whether she made the proper decision, given the circumstances. To her it was a decision that was necessary, though evil, and like tens of thousands of women throughout the country, Sugimoto regularly visits a Buddhist temple to console a tiny statuette, known as a mizuko jizo, that to her personifies her forgone baby.

"I think I've done something bad enough to be cursed," said Sugimoto, in jeans and a down jacket, who traveled here from Tokyo. "I'll be scared when I have my next baby."

Japan is not sundered by the kind of debates about abortion that are common in the West. In Japan, abortion is entirely legal in the first five months of pregnancy, and it hardly stirs a murmur within society. There are no protests at abortion clinics, no debates about banning abortions and no politicians taking stands on the issue. The last legal restrictions on abortion were removed in 1948.

Even though virtually everyone here believes that the decision on whether to have an abortion is a woman's own business, it is striking how uneasy many of those women are after exercising their right to have an abortion.

In Japan, there is not the religious belief, common in other societies, that a fetus is a human being who has a right to life. But the vast differences among cultures does not mean that a Japanese woman might not feel some disquiet over choosing to abort.

The signs of a pervasive but silent mourning over abortions are the tens of thousands of mizuko jizo, or guardians of aborted fetuses, miscarried and stillborn babies and those who died very early in life. In temples across the country, women and sometimes men come to stand before these monuments to express their grief, fears, confusions and hopes of forgiveness.

It is often intimidation that sends young Japanese women into Buddhist temples after an abortion, a superstitious fear that the hush-hush act of getting an abortion might curse their lives or the lives of their future progeny. But there are deeper sentiments as well.

"The fact that you have murdered someone will be with you all your life - it will not disappear," said a 27-year-old salesman, whose words prompted a swell of tears from his girlfriend as they stood before a mizuko jizo.

Mostly because they were not married, the couple decided on an abortion.

"We talked about it a lot," said the 24-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. "I'll never tell my family."

Like Sugimoto, these temple worshipers pay a fee to adopt a mizuko and inscribe their names on it. They often regard it as representing their own forsaken baby, who lives at the temple.

They dress up the mizuko figurines like little newborns, wrapping them with bibs, hand-knit sweaters, booties or hats against the cold. And they pour water over the childlike figurines to quench their thirst.

"I pray for its spirit to safely enter the other world, which it can't do easily because it died from my own negligence, my mistakes," said a middle-aged Japanese woman who has been coming for the last 10 years to comfort her mizuko jizo.

Mizuko jizo, which literally means bodhisattva of the water-babies, in recent decades has come to refer to aborted fetuses who were stranded on the banks of the river that according to Japanese Buddhist tradition separates the worlds of life and death.

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Photo Rituals with mizuko jizo, monuments to unborn fetuses, are believed to help unborn children find peace. The New York Times