American tactics have been brought to Australia as the abortion debate continues to divide
Most Australians support abortion, although many disagree about the legislation surrounding it. But right-to-life movements that see all abortion as murder are getting louder, as Tory Shepherd reports.
When Greens MLC Tammy Franks introduced a Bill to decriminalise abortion to the South Australian Parliament, her staff received death threats. And rape threats.
Before the federal election, anti-abortion group Cherish Life dropped 700,000 leaflets into letterboxes that claimed “more babies would die under a Bill Shorten Labor government”.
Labor was genuinely concerned that the scare campaign would have an impact.
Abortion – along with other conscience issues including euthanasia – has always sparked fierce debate.
Debate that sometimes veers into the vitriolic, and the personal.
With legislation on decriminalising abortion under consideration in South Australia and NSW, that debate will continue to rage.
But there’s been a new edge to it lately, a Flinders University academic says. She blames the US.
Prudence Flowers, a lecturer in US history, says opponents are inspired by the right-to-life movement in the the States.
She sees the influence in their rhetoric and lobbying techniques.
“This has been a trend in the anti-abortion movement in Australia for a while now,” she wrote in The Conversation.
“Activists have adopted some of the most successful elements of the US movement’s rhetoric and tactics in recent years in an effort to influence the debate in Australia.”
In the US, some states are working on near-total abortion bans. In Alabama, for example, there are no exceptions to the ban for rape and incest.
A five-months-pregnant woman, who was shot in the stomach by a co-worker, was charged with manslaughter because she started the fight and the foetus could have been hurt. The charges were later dropped.
Dr Flowers argues that Australia is part of the same transnational network that is pushing for total abortion bans. She names two groups, born in the US, that have set up here.
Helpers of God’s Precious Infants argue that rape victims should be forced to carry the foetus because, they argue, abortion is a second rape.
Activists from 40 Days for Life protest outside medical centres that perform abortions.
They calls for people to pray and fast to drive out the “demons” of abortion.
They say they are peaceful but there are multiple reports that they harass women using the centres, and take pictures or even video them.
These and other groups have ensured that discussion of the actual legislation before both the NSW and SA parliaments have been hijacked by claims that abortions will be allowed right up until birth, and that people will use abortions to pick what sex they want their child to be.
Both are straw-man arguments, distracting from the proper debate, that have been imported from the US.
Dr Flowers says highlighting late-term abortions is an “ever-shifting terrain, allowing for opponents to push for a lower and lower limit”.
It’s seen as a distraction because late-term abortions are almost exclusively carried out when there are severe foetal abnormalities.
Then there is an argument about sex-selective abortions.
In robo-calls made to NSW residents, former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce weighed in. He used the false argument that abortion would be legal “for any reason right up until the day of birth”, and also said the legislation “allows sex-selective abortions”.
This is another complicated and emotional debate – even though there’s scant evidence that women would use abortion to not have another boy, for example.
Dr Flowers is worried. “Collectively, these more covert right-to-life strategies have been part of a massive erosion of abortion rights in the US,” she wrote.
“In an Australian context, they work in more subtle ways …. they are drawing from the US right-to-life movements to shape how it is culturally, medically and legally understood in Australia.”
The State Government has asked for a review of the abortion laws. Attorney-General Vickie Chapman said Tammy Franks’s Bill was “too broad”, and referred the issue to the SA Law Reform Institute. The Institute is expected to deliver its recommendations in September. In NSW, the debate is set to drag into next month as well.
Deliberately or not, the Australian Christian Lobby will present the controversial movie Unplanned to Australian audiences in September. The film has fuelled anti-abortion activism in the US but has been derided as “propaganda” by detractors. It has been described as gruesome, eye-opening, wildly inaccurate, and important.