In commenting on the current guidelines that restrict AusAid from funding family planning advice, the report of the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development in 2007 was succinct:
Comprehensive sexual and reproductive health programming should be pursued in the aid program… However, Australia places restrictions on the use of aid funds in this area…these restrictions deny women the same access to reproductive health choices, education and services we give ourselves.
The group’s chair, Liberal MP Dr Mal Washer, was pithier still:
What is even more ridiculous or more repugnant is that we’re saying in these guidelines that if you go and have an illegal abortion where there is a 13 per cent chance of death on average and you happen to survive, we’re happy to give you counselling. Well, that’s good for those who didn’t die but for the 13 per cent, I think counselling dead people is pretty difficult.
The origins of the family planning restrictions on Australia’s foreign aid program in the previous Government’s shameless duchessing of Brian Harradine have now been well raked over. Harradine has gotten off lightly. He retains a reputation as some sort of paragon of independence and senatorial judgement.
But during the Howard years, he used his position to systematically debauch policy and inflict his own Catholic fundamentalism on Australians. He was responsible for blocking access to RU-486, demanding the imposition of the AusAid family planning guidelines, and channelling tens of millions of dollars down the drain on pork barrelling in Tasmania, all in exchange for supporting policy triumphs like the sale of Telstra.
As a consequence of the restrictions, thousands of women overseas have died from unsafe abortions (see Sue Dunlevy’s excellent article from last year for some figures). Those deaths are a direct legacy of Brian Harradine and the Howard Government’s willingness to cater to the medieval delusions of the superstitious.
Now the religious wingnuts are lining up again to try to block removal of the restrictions, which has been under consideration since early March by an ALP caucus committee. National Senator Ron Boswell, the ambling cretin from Queensland, has been warning of a reaction from Christians if the Government removes the restrictions. Sydney Labor MP John Murphy, another Federal politician unlikely to trouble the scorers in an IQ competition, has been making similar noises. The pair was behind efforts several years ago to instigate a “debate” over banning Medicare funding for abortion.
And help is on the way for them. As Michelle Grattan noted on the weekend, John Hogg, soon to become Senate President, is a forceful advocate for retention of the restrictions. Hogg is from the most appalling union in the country, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, run for decades by conservative Catholic Joe De Bruyn.
In what is bad news for anyone with social views from later than the thirteenth century, the SDA did well in the 2007 election. Its SA State President (and another Catholic fundamentalist) Don Farrell arrives in the Senate on 1 July, replacing Linda Kirk, who lost Farrell’s backing for daring to vote in favour of stem-cell research. Reps MPs Kate Ellis and newcomer Nick Champion are both ex-SDA and protégés of Farrell’s.
Opponents of change will also be able to count on Senator Jacinta Collins from Victoria, also from the SDA, who replaced Robert Ray and is already in the Senate following his early departure. She campaigned against stem cell research and is fiercely anti-abortion.
There’s another politician opposed to removing the restrictions – a former chairman of the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development, no less. Brendan Nelson supported the removal of restrictions on RU-486, and the ban on stem cell cloning, under the previous Government. But he doesn’t support Australian aid being used to inform women about abortion.
Gee Brendan, how about some of that Emo Man fury for Third World women who die from botched abortions?
We don’t accept the right of fundamentalists to dictate women’s reproductive rights in this country. But apparently, when it’s foreign women, poor women, women with different-coloured skin, it doesn’t matter so much, regardless of the fact that the restrictions on AusAid’s activities directly lead to the deaths of some of those women. The people who support the restrictions are tolerating and encouraging those deaths in the name of religious fundamentalism – or political expediency.
There is no excuse. Everyone involved in establishing the restrictions has blood on their hands. And so will anyone who supports their retention.
Well said, Bernard. What’s wrong with Crikey subscribers who think like you? I rushed to see their comments and join the numerous pro-choice supporters who were bound to want their say. If they don’t come forward to express support in a forum like this what hope is there that they’ll get onto their local members about this issue. Are they all so complacent about their own ease of access to terminations that they they can’t imagine the agony of a mother already with too many mouths to feed risking death
rather than bring another into a world promising only starvation? And politicians on both sides claim a “conscience” vote on this issue!
Patricia I admit I thought I’d be inundated with emails abusive and supportive and there’d be a flood of comments about this. Just goes to show you can never pick what will get people excited. Or at least, I can’t.
Religious fundametalists control women by using their children as hostages. Women who try to assert their right make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies are forced into submision by pregnancy and the dependancy of their children.
I understand Brian Harradine fathered a large family but he wouldn’t have spent much of his own time fullfuilling the day to day chores that children bring to a household.
Priests and politicians who refuse to permit all women to plan the number of children to whom they give birth are abusing their power.
I must register a complaint about Bernard Keane’s comment that the Catholic/politicians of Australia are medieval dellusionists. (if there is such a word) Au contraire their beliefs come from about 10,000 BC, when shepherds, bored out of their wits by the clear desert nights, would sit around inventing stories. It was all too much to imagine that the world was not created by a single vengeful God.: thus religion was born.
That the Catholic Church is continually forcing its olde worlde dictates, via the Jesuit trained politicians, men such as Tony Abbott , as was the charmer, Bartholomew Augustine Michael-call me Bob, Santamaria, to whom the Catholic Church used to grovel. We used to live in the same street as the school Loretto Convent. As soon as an election was immanent the good nuns would hit the street running, with their DLP signs and bill boards, soliciting votes.
Why the good sisters were so anxious to support candidates whose hostility to women was on a par with Islamic fundamentalism, is a mystery. Sheer ignorance I suppose. They had the most lovely dog who waited outside the side gates, to greet the school kids. He had, of course, been de-sexed. Once I asked the head nun, Sister Bernadette? I can’t remember. Why it was OK to de-sex animals, but not humans. She was a very nice lady who took the comment in good heart.
Just as Australia heaved a sigh of relief when ‘call me Bob’ Santamaria kicked the bucket, along came Brian Harradine, followed by Tony Abbott, good Jesuits to a man. I suspect Nelson Eddy. Oops, Brendon Eddy, I’ll get there in a minute. Brendan Nelson. Who was so quick to be anti-euthanasia to be another one. The names you mentioned Bernard are a chilling reminder that we Australians are, in fact, despite our much vaunted constitution, living in a rabid Catholic theocracy.
Bernard, a good Catholic never says that a child died, as a result of an abortion, No; that child becomes ‘a poor innocent life’. Children die as a result of small pox, starvation and disease. But never because of an abortion. All those hypocritical and bent violin strings have to be plucked.That they die in misery, despair and squalor, together with their wretched mothers, is the most vile sentence to be handed out to women after the multiple rape and stoning sentence of women handed out by the mad mullahs of Islam.
If anyone imagines that Kevin Rudd, another self-righteous Bible basher will do anything to stand up to these depraved monsters, you have another think coming.
These comments of mine are a result of our beloved leader, being as big a hypocrite as his inglorious predecessor.
Read Bernard’s comment again John. He didn’t say it would excite him, but possibly (or not) the readers.
Sentencing the unborn to a lifetime’s starvation is better, of course.