If there’s one truth I’ve delivered countless times in my career as a feminist and abortion rights activist, it is that the assault on a woman’s right to choose in the United States has nothing to do with rescuing foetuses.
It’s about controlling the lives of women.
Don’t take my word for it. Academics who interviewed the leaders and foot soldiers of the American anti-choice movement in the 1980s say the same. “While on the surface it is the embryo’s fate that seems to be at stake,” writes Kristin Luker in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, “the abortion debate is about the meanings of women’s lives.”
Faye D Ginsburg, author of Contested Lives, agrees that while anti-choice women see their rejection of abortion as a positive assertion of traditional feminine values like nurturance, “by contrast, women who abort or advocate abortion are marked as ‘unfemale’”.
My interviews with Australian anti-choice activists in the 1990s showed the same thing: anti-choice women see themselves as “good” women willing to prioritise motherhood over ambitions for education or work, while women who chose abortion were “selfish”, career-focused “feminists” who wanted to play without paying.
The role of a politicised Christianity can’t be understated. To have in-group solidarity, some must be on the outer. While American Christians had long relied on racism to serve this end, the government’s enforcement of the Supreme Court’s ruling against school segregation in the 1970s caused hysteria among religious parents, though their leaders understood that “building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools” wasn’t a viable national political strategy.
So perhaps with the past success of the witch-burning movement in mind, they moved the target to the backs of American women instead.
Is Australia any different? Are we, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggested yesterday, immune to the cynical deployment of one of the world’s oldest prejudices — misogyny — to serve partisan interests?
Absolutely not. As the Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said, Australians must “remain vigilant because hard-fought-for wins before our parliaments can be taken away easily”. She should know. Gallagher and her colleague Wayne Berry spent years battling anti-choice politicians in the ACT before finally succeeding in extracting abortion from the territory’s criminal law in 2002.
But Gallagher’s statement also points Australian women to one true cause for optimism: that the nightmare enveloping our American sisters will not happen here. It’s the difference in how our right to choose was won. State by state and territory by territory, as a result of truly local campaigns that went on for years: collecting signatures on petitions, passing out leaflets, holding rallies and education campaigns for MPs until a real change of hearts and minds was achieved.
These solid and sustainable majorities in support of women’s rights as human rights provided the cover politicians needed to debate the abortion issue in Parliament, and to make sustainable changes to the law. Changes that can’t be simply reversed by the stroke of a pen, which is how Roe v. Wade came into existence, and has now met its untimely end.
Mercifully, Australia does not operate under the dark shadow of religion which has infiltrated US society. As today’s statistics reveal, we are becoming less religious with each census – therefore less malleable to the politics of control. The propaganda & rabid patriotism which works with the masses in the US is mostly dismissed here.
Thankfully we don’t have the religious society America has, nor can minority positions swing government because it pulls enough people to the polls.
Like gun control, this issue feels like another where what goes on in the USA is a cautionary tale. There’s plenty of other ways Australian politics goes stupid, don’t get me wrong, but at least on this issue we don’t have the demographics or political system to empower the nutters.
Agree. Requiring everyone to vote counts that vast common sense in the middle.
It’s about controlling the lives of women primarily, I agree. But it’s also about controlling the lives of the working class, both female and male.
If you are a wealthy US female, do you really think rescinding Roe vs Wade will have any impact whatsoever on your access to safe, trained medical abortion? Or will you simply book a return flight to somewhere in Europe or elsewhere for a few days?
For most women who are well off and healthy, it will be okay.
But for those who need emergency care, which precludes travel – don’t be too sure.
In Poland abortion is allowed only when the woman’s life is at risk, but there’s enormous uncertainty how, exactly, doctors can prove that the woman would have died, especially when they care for her and she survives as a result. Last year, a woman died of sepsis while her doctors were crossing their Ts and dotting their Is making sure that providing the medical care she needed wouldn’t land them in prison for 20 years. (Yes, twenty years). The patient died precisely because she needed emergency care and couldn’t just cross the border to Germany.
Pretty much the exact same happened in Ireland – the landmark case that finally made them legalise abortion. The now deceased woman in question was a dentist, so presumably not terribly poor.
In a number of American states, patients presenting with incomplete miscarriage are turned away at emergency departments already.
As usual, the poor will be hit by far the hardest – I wouldn’t deny that for a second.
But make no mistake: no pregnant woman in the affected states will be entirely safe.
And the cruelty is the point.
Roe v Wade doesn’t have anything to with Australia – no matter how you try to twist it. It is merely a US constitutional issue whereby the court said it was a problem for elected representatives.
Nothing to do with Constitutional rights- why should one individual have more rights than others -under the law everyone is equal – logically why should females have more rights than males if all are equalled the goal is equality.
As for abortion – it should be between the doctor and the patient, the State should butt out- this is what the reality is in Australia. Anyone trying to morph problems in other countries to become problems here should be roundly denounced.
“Anyone trying to morph problems in other countries to become problems here should be roundly denounced.”
This is a strange way of looking at this article. There’s plenty of pathways for issues in another country to have parallels in our own politics without anything needing to try to “morph problems in other countries to become problems here”.
Not least because of how much of the American political narrative pervades the internet and the media we consume, but also because there are patterns to cultural change and similar factors in different countries. Why would we think that we’re so exceptional that nothing that goes on outside our shores wouldn’t have any relevance to us?
Using this reasoning, with male circumcision being a common practise, female circumcision should be legal?
Don’t give people like that ideas.
If it makes you sleep better, I’m perfectly happy for every man to freely choose whether or not he wants to remove any fetus that has burrowed its way into his reproductive tract and hooked itself up to his bloodstream.
I don’t have a problem with women having to carry a baby to term if they can drop it off at the nearest rabid right-to-lifer’s house for them to take responsibility for feeding, clothing and educating the said child.
The hypocrisy of the Right to Life mob is extraordinary. They don’t give a toss what happens to the child once it’s out, or whether the pregnant woman wants or is able to care for it.
Contraception should never be a bone of contention; nor should access to safe abortion. It is far better for people to have children they genuinely want to care for, than to be forced into maternity.