As goes the US on push for abortion, so goes it here

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Houston, Texas. Picture: AFP

This week the election of the next US president is on all our minds, and who wouldn’t be depressed?

Two candidates for the world’s most powerful political position and what do we have? A coarse narcissist who seems to think God has chosen him. His opponent isn’t much better. I suspect she may be worse. A person with little experience of the kind necessary to lead the US and she has only one platform: abortion.

It is difficult for many people to understand how Kamala Harris can elevate such a thing to become the ultimate symbol of women’s rights and health. Never mind that she is hoping to lead the most unhealthy country in the developed world. Healthcare for feminists in this race is not real healthcare, it is about an ideology of control.

However, the emphasis on abortion in the Harris campaign could have an echo in this country. Labor borrows a lot of its strategy ideas from the US Democrats and it already has tried to stymie the Liberal National Party in the Queensland election by raising abortion. So perhaps we should be prepared for more of the same in the federal election next year.

In the US, access to abortion is thought to be a vote changer, especially for women who normally would vote Republican but are cool on Donald Trump. Here, it is thought by some strategists that it may be a vote changer for women who are generally conservative but don’t like Peter Dutton.

The issue has been given further media impetus by the walkout at the Australian Catholic University graduation over a speech by Joe de Bruyn that urged graduands to stand up against abortion. The walkout was typical of an institution whose name is an oxymoron – neither Catholic nor a university – where students didn’t even have the good manners to stay and listen to de Bruyn.

The former head of the “shoppies” union not only knows and respects Catholic teaching, but he also has fought for workers’ rights in a relatively low-paid industry for much of his life, unlike the students who mostly have no grounding in rational thinking or real life.

Students are entitled to freedom of thought and opinion, although a friend musing on student immaturity wryly recalled a walkout by students at his alma mater, Harvard, in 1978. The speaker was Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In Australia, people really don’t want to discuss abortion. Who can blame them? It is at least a highly distasteful subject. But that doesn’t stop the feminist establishment from metaphorically pushing it down our throats. The latest area for the institutional feminists to set their sights on is the availability of abortion in public hospitals.

However, the main reason for this is not just about abortion. No, there is another agenda behind this. It is to use abortion to get rid of Catholic healthcare.

If you think this is an exaggeration, think about the reasons for the ACT Labor-Greens government’s takeover of Calvary public hospital. It was a land grab, but availability of so-called reproductive services, which is code for abortion, was the main ideological reason behind the takeover, and this was admitted as far back as 2011 when Katy Gallagher was chief minister. Public hospitals do not do abortions unless it is an emergency procedure. Now there is more.

Recently, that reliable mouthpiece of the left, Guardian Australia, has been running articles attacking the federal government for funding Catholic public hospitals, especially in Queensland, and accusing Catholic hospitals of “using religion” to opt out of reproductive healthcare, even criticising the federal government for not tying funding of public hospitals to providing abortion.

The latest of these incendiary reports claims this is “despite women having to ‘shop around’ for abortion care when their pregnancies are unviable”.

The last statement is baloney. If a pregnancy is truly unviable – that is, the foetus is not alive, not simply unwanted because of an abnormality or for some other reason – it must be terminated or grave complications can ensue.

However, the direct link with the current rhetoric from the Harris camp, recently voiced by Michelle Obama, is uncanny.

The Guardian Australia rhetoric echoes US organs of the left such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times by using these extreme examples to further the “abortion is good healthcare” line.

Abortion is not performed in Australian public hospitals, mainly because it is not treating the sick, and it clogs up beds for women who are truly sick. As someone who has had a close call myself, I can tell you that good timely obstetrics saves lives. But this isn’t what we are talking about when we talk abortion. We are talking about ultimate control, and 80,000 lives lost in Australia every year.

This isn’t really a political issue. It is a moral issue, but the institutional feminists and lukewarm politicians will continue to use it in whatever way they can to further their political clout. There are too many powerful vested interests, particularly entrenched in the state-run women’s health services.

In states such as Queensland and Victoria they have not only succeeded in introducing abortion to term, but in Victoria they have prevented doctors, by law, from exercising their conscience to refuse to refer for abortion.

It seems that for feminists every moral objection must be subsumed to the ideology of control. Never mind that a developing human being is a different body, a sacred trust within our bodies. They will have a different mind, a different heart, a different intellect. They are a different person.

To say that abortion is the right to control your body is irrational, but we live in a world full of irrationality. As for the religious view, it is rational, but another reason that I find the emphasis on abortion appalling are the lives I carried to term myself.