Tory Shepherd: US abortion bans are closer to home than many realise
Abortion rarity should come from access to contraception, quality education, and fewer rapes. Not from forcing women to carry babies they don’t want and brutally heckling political parties, writes Tory Shepherd.
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There are people out there who think women should get the death penalty for having an abortion.
It would be tragicomic if it weren’t so hypocritical, with such an overwhelmingly tragic outcome if they won. Maybe we can call it tragitragihypocomic.
We can’t pretend that such a tragitragihypocomic situation would not happen here.
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In Texas, US politicians considered a Bill that would have made abortions illegal — with the threat of the death penalty for women and physicians.
It stalled, for now, but that push is part of a bigger agenda in the US, where various states are trying to tear down the historic Roe v Wade case.
That case enshrined a constitutional right to abortion, and it is under attack on several fronts as emboldened extremists bask in the Trump era.
There are 16 states actively trying to water down the laws. Alabama already outlawed abortion.
President Donald Trump himself now says abortions should only be allowed in rape and incest cases, and where the woman’s life is threatened. He used to be pro-choice.
Here, Labor women are reportedly girding their loins, preparing to defend the party’s abortion policy. There were rabid attacks from pro-lifers during the election campaign — including in South Australia — and some believe it had an impact.
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One mob posted hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, used pictures of the Grim Reaper, and claimed “more babies would die” under a Labor government.
In Australia, abortions come under state laws. Labor were looking at making abortions free in public hospitals, and giving women better access to contraception. The abortion rate has been dropping, and the policy was geared at giving more equitable access.
We have learned, from this election and those that have gone before, that fear campaigns work: Whether they’re straight out lies, misrepresentations, wild exaggerations, or appalling appeals to emotion.
The catchcry for years was that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare”.
Sensible words, but the rarity clause is where some extremist views can kick in.
Abortion rarity should come from access to contraception, quality education, and fewer rapes.
Not from forcing women to carry babies they don’t want.
Most Australians agree that pregnancy terminations should be legal, while they may have differing beliefs over the circumstances in which they’re available.
The extremists, however, believe they are never acceptable.
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They believe that a rape victim should be forced to carry the foetus of her abuser.
That a rape victim should be forced to carry the foetus of her abuser even if it’s her father, or brother, or carer.
That a rape victim should be forced to carry that foetus to birth.
And then there are those who think that she deserves to die if she doesn’t.
At its most extreme, it’s the sort of thinking that leads people to believe every sperm is sacred, every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed in your neighbourhood.
There’s a reason Monty Python took the utter mickey out of that hard-line Catholic view: If you think that it’s the DNA itself and its ultimate potential that’s sacred then contraception is as bad as abortion. Even male masturbation is a lost opportunity to impregnate someone.
Most thinking people, however, don’t see it that way.
Most thinking people realise it would be wrong to force a woman — or girl — to carry a baby to term.
People may believe a human is formed the minute a sperm hits an egg, and burrows its way in to start this awesome process of genesis. And that anything that interrupts that process is akin to murder.
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But most believe that there is a continuum: That somewhere along the line of making a human there are incremental steps.
Gametes meet, a zygote is formed. Eventually a baby human is born.
There are grey areas in all of this, of course. But not for these anti-abortion extremists.
They are so lacking in grey matter, they end up in this black and white world where it’s OK to kill a female because she didn’t carry a clump of cells to term.
And here, Labor’s policy was about equity and access, about ensuring that, for example, a girl in rural Queensland has the same choices and options as a woman in Burnside. That her life did not take an entirely different direction just because she wasn’t in the right suburb.
Our patchwork laws make women’s access vulnerable.
In NSW, for example, abortion is still criminal.
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In SA, two doctors have to agree a woman’s life or mental health is at risk.
It’s important we keep having conversations about abortion, its availability, and its impact.
But we can never become complacent about women’s reproductive freedom — the US has just shown how swiftly that can be taken away.
Especially if anyone bothers to listen to this squawking minority that thinks they have more right to control a woman’s body than she does.
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