Claire Harvey: Stop lying about women who have abortions

I know women who have had abortions and I can assure you not one of them was for convenience or gender selection. This utter nonsense perpetuated about abortion in the past fortnight has to stop, writes Claire Harvey.

Know anyone who’s had an abortion?

I do. Not many women. But enough to know none of them deserve the misrepresentation and pure nonsense we’ve heard about abortion in the past fortnight.

If you think women are about to start gleefully aborting late-term babies because they’re getting a promotion or they forgot a manicure appointment, let me introduce you to some of my friends.

There’s the woman who was raped by her abusive partner at the age of 28 and had an abortion at 14 weeks after long and awful agonising because she couldn’t face raising his child as a single mother, as she knew she would be, and she couldn’t take the risk the baby would be battered by this same man. She’s still haunted by the emptiness where that child would have been.

Women do not need men in Macquarie Street lecturing them about morality or humanity. Picture: istock

Or how about the woman who, at her 20-week scan, was told her baby was catastrophically disabled and would not survive beyond birth?

She waited four weeks before summoning the courage to terminate the pregnancy. She was 37 then.

She’s never recovered from the grief of the baby she feels she was unable to protect.

And there’s the woman who, at 21, terminated a pregnancy after a one-night stand.

This is before the morning-after pill was legally available in Australia, and she went through seven weeks of agonising worry before deciding to terminate the pregnancy.

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Later on, in a happy marriage in her 30s, she lost several babies to miscarriage and lived in pure terror that she’d never be a mum, alongside the guilt over the long-lost baby whose life she had chosen to end.

If you think women are not capable of processing the complex moral questions around abortion, then I’d suggest you reconsider the calibre of your friendships.

The women I know are deeply aware of the gravity of abortion as a topic. They know this is about human life. They know the stakes. They don’t need men in Macquarie Street to lecture them about morality or humanity.

I’ve never known a woman who had an abortion lightly or recklessly.

I’ve never known a woman who didn’t grieve over the life of a child who could have been.

And I do not believe for one second that any Australian woman will terminate a late-term pregnancy for “lifestyle” or convenience reasons.

And gender selection? Give me a break. As if anyone would wait until 22 weeks to terminate a pregnancy because they suddenly realised it was a dreaded girl. Pregnant women find out the gender at 10 weeks’ gestation these days, people.

The exquisitely tiny minority who want to ‘gender-select’ are doing it anyway and they’re not

waiting until the advanced stages of pregnancy.

Does anyone seriously believe that a woman would wait until 22 weeks to terminate a pregnancy based on gender? Member for Mulgoa Tanya Davies does. Picture: AAP Image/Joel Carrett

Does anyone seriously believe a woman would happily go through the difficult, nauseous, exhausting early months of pregnancy before deciding she actually wasn’t that keen?

The women I know have babies because we desperately want them, because we lie awake at night thinking of tiny fingernails and soft kisses, because we live in fear that we might not be lucky enough to be mothers. This is our primary evolutionary drive. My lifelong ambition has been to have a child of my own. I’ve been blessed to have two. They are the centre of my life.

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When a pregnancy is terminated, it is usually for a very good reason that is, frankly, nobody else’s business. In the late stages of pregnancy, terminations only happen when something has gone catastrophically wrong: a disability, a crisis of abuse, a crippling mental illness.

I passionately believe pregnancies are not being terminated lightly or carelessly. And I wish we could talk about this issue without denigrating women’s intentions, or our humanity.

Claire Harvey is The Sunday Telegraph’s deputy editor.