The US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade signals a dark time for women. Lives will be lost as reproductive rights are stripped away.
The anti-abortion lobby has successfully pushed its narrative that banning abortions saves lives, that abortion is always a choice, and that late-term abortions are common. There are a number of harmful lies peddled by these anti-women groups, both in the US and in Australia. Here are the facts.
Fact: abortion is healthcare
Abortions are medically necessary health interventions. Up to one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage before 20 weeks (and about half of all fertilised eggs die, often before a woman knows she is pregnant).
More than 50% of all women who miscarry require medical intervention consisting of medication to speed up the miscarriage or a procedure that prevents infection by cutting out pregnancy tissue that remains in the uterus. This is crucial during a missed miscarriage — where the pregnancy has stopped growing but hasn’t passed.
Unplanned pregnancies are not the only reason to seek an abortion. It can be due to contraception failure — no contraception is 100% effective even when used effectively, and not every woman can access or use contraceptives. It can be due to violence, rape or intimate partner violence. Women may seek abortions due to foetal anomalies, or illness during pregnancy.
Pregnancy carries a number of risks. In Australia, one in 100 women experiences severe complications with their pregnancies. Australia has one of the lowest maternal death rates in the world at 6.7 deaths per 100,000 women giving birth, and terminating dangerous pregnancies attributes to this low death rate.
There are major concerns in the US that pregnant women may be denied healthcare, such as chemotherapy, if they are pregnant, prioritising the foetus’ survival over the woman’s.
Myth: late-term abortions are common
Medical abortions — taking two pills to stop a pregnancy — can be used up to nine weeks’ gestation in Australia. The pills are low-risk, available via Telehealth and the preferred method if the pregnancy is noticed in time. Since 2001, surgical abortions halved in Australia, largely thanks to the introduction of medical abortion in 2006 and adding these medications to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in 2013.
But women have to be prescribed the medication at just eight weeks’ gestation — that’s before many women realise they’re pregnant. Of the 88,000 abortions that took place in Australia between 2017 and 2018, almost 21,000 were medical.
Most abortions in Australia take place during the first trimester of pregnancy, and late-term abortions are rare. Most abortions that take place after 20 weeks are due to the foetus being diagnosed with a severe abnormality, which can only be diagnosed at the 19-week mark.
Myth: criminalising abortions stops them
The United Nations estimates that 25 million unsafe abortions take place every year, killing nearly 50,000 women. Worldwide, 48% of all induced abortions are unsafe, accounting for an estimated 13% of maternal deaths.
About one in five pregnancies end in induced abortions. Abortions occur at more than double the rate in low-income countries than in high-income countries due to the affordability and availability of contraception.
In high-income countries, including Australia, the abortion rate is 15 per 1000 women.
Myth: young, single women seek abortions
About one in six women in Australia and New Zealand have had an abortion by their mid-30s. While women in their 20s and single were more likely to have an abortion, women with children are more likely to have an abortion than women without children.
It’s not just cis-women who seek abortions either: transgender and non-binary people also experience unwanted pregnancies and face structural barriers to accessing abortion services. In the US, one-third of non-gender-conforming people considered accessing an unsafe abortion over a clinical one.
Myth: abortions are accessible across Australia
The overturning of Roe v Wade is not likely to affect Australia’s abortion laws. Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights and abortion legislation is dealt with by states and territories, with abortion decriminalised everywhere but Western Australia.
But that doesn’t mean abortion is accessible: it’s been called a “postcode lottery”, with women in regional areas forced to travel hundreds of kilometres to access a surgical abortion. Doctors can also conscientiously object to providing abortions, a major issue in regional areas with religious hospitals.
In some states, such as NSW, medical abortions are available through private providers and cost hundreds of dollars.
I’ve always been pro-choice which I know is really pro-abortion. And this, in a primary sense, hasn’t changed. Yet it astounds me that, as polarised and uncompromising as the debate has been for decades, there’s barely a whisper about the collateral damage. As a man any mention of the subject and I’m banned from participating. I have no voice. Yet in late 1984 when my ex-wife wanted to abort our ( now 36 year old daughter ) and third child I said no. The reason was simple. It had nothing to do rights or religion and everything to do with responsibility. It was a pitifully puerile thing to do when we could well afford a third child. It was all about a self absorbed woman who became so because of an abortion she’d had at sixteen. And hated herself for it. Which made our marriage hell. I fully understand that I was powerless to actually prevent it happening. Apart from one crucial thing. She knew that I’d take our two sons and leave and without (incredibly hardworking ) me she’d be living in a tent. Bottom line disregard the vacuous claims of those like Nada Sotland (135th President of the APA) Germaine Greer and others who declare there’s no such thing as post-abortion trauma. There is and it is pernicious. And particularly for the several women I’ve known during my life who never ever got over it. And it destroyed them. I find much of what Amber has to say irrelevant. It’s a rambling piece poorly conceived. The medical issues she raises are mostly way off piste.
Never ignore the irrationality of a bereaved, or self thwarted, mother – Solomon saw it.
With respect, your comments do sound as if you’re carrying a lot of anger and resentment due to the specific issues within your marriage. I’m very sorry for the losses and grief you refer to however it sounds as if this is colouring your views to the extent that you find it hard to be objective about the subject.
I’m extremely grateful that I was able to access abortion services in my 20’s. Due to unresolved childhood trauma I was in no state to raise a child and I don’t feel traumatised by terminating my pregnancy- just the opposite.
I think the article is relevant and timely.
Thank you Amber for putting the Truth in Statistics out there at this Pivotal moment in history. The overturning of Roe V Wade shows how far the American Ultra Right Wing, Neo Conservative Religious Zealots are prepared to go, to drag Womens Rights backwards to the mid 20th Century. Next they will strip away the right to vote, and make women subservient to the fat old white Misogynistic men of yesteryear. They have already disenfranchised thousands of non white voters in many American States. Watch the Same Brain Dead, Misinformed, Maladjusted Miscreants chanting Jesus and waving at a non existent entity in the Sky try the same thing here in Australia. This is how modern civilisations collapse, the Morons and Imbeciles get their way in tearing down the Scientific progressives. What a disgusting pitiful sight America is today. Sisters of the World Unite Cheers from Michael. Australia.
It’s nauseating seeing how movements spread to Australian society from the USA, Q Anon, anti-vax, ‘Hillside’ style worshipping and watch the anti-abortion mob come out to pedal their ugly agenda.
In some ways, the anti-abortion advocates are smart because they pay lip service to secular reasoning – by trying to frame abortion in a way that it only deals with unwanted pregnancy, it can make the decision to abort seem selfish and callous, and it can take the conversation away from those many awkward cases where it’s not so clearcut.
What’s frustrating about the thing is that it’s lip service. For them, it’s a moral issue and all those complicating factors are irrelevant. For people who think it’s murder, they aren’t going to be persuaded by concerns for the life of the mother or circumstances in which pregnancy is forced upon the would-be mother.
In their view, abortion is wrong, wrong, wrong, and all arguments aren’t going to touch that. Anything that happens to a woman trying to terminate a pregnancy is on them – they are doing an immoral act and negative outcomes are the price they pay for it. Just like those criminals killed by cops – they “deserve” it because they are in the moral wrong.
So we’re left needing to be able to defend abortion on secular terms knowing full well that the merits of the secular arguments won’t ever appease those who are anti-abortion as a matter of moral principle.
‘Medical intervention consisting of medication to speed up the miscarriage or a procedure that prevents infection by cutting out pregnancy tissue that remains in the uterus.’ is, by definition, NOT an abortion.
That really depends on who does the defining. There are state laws in the USA according to which it IS an abortion. Not to mention partial miscarriage in which electrical activity in the remaining cells is detectable. This is widely defined as a “heartbeat” in heartbeat laws in similar states.
This is just a continuation of the “surely there’s an exception” argument. Very often no, there is no exception.
Yes, it shows what sort of twisted reality the anti abortionists dwell in.
It would be very scary to live as a young female in USA.
Thanks Amber for the snappy and startling statistics. But to pro-life zealots, God has no use for science or proven facts and neither do his followers.