US surge to enshrine rights of unborn could revive local movement

THIS week Mississippi is set to take a monumental step. It is voting to adopt a "personhood" amendment to its constitution.

The idea is simple enough. It will amend the constitution of that US state to define all life as beginning at conception. The amendment reads: "The term person, or persons, shall include every human being from the moment of fertilisation, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."

The powerful pro-choice lobby, Planned Parenthood, fought tooth and nail to prevent the proposition appearing on the ballot - and lost.

Personhood amendments are being formulated in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and one has passed in Louisiana. State by state, this bold strategy is surging ahead at a grassroots level, even to the surprise of some conservatives who do not support the tactic. It has taken the sober strategists by surprise. Even the American Catholic bishops have been silent. But it is not really surprising. It comes after three national Gallup values and beliefs polls that indicate the number of Americans claiming to be pro-life now outnumbers those saying they are pro-choice.

In stark contrast to Australia, the pro-life movement in the US has achieved huge momentum for change. Its supporters are overwhelmingly young and they use a variety of successful strategies, political and personal, pushing the human rights of the unborn, the main victim in any abortion, as well as being pro-woman, the emotional victim of abortion. However, in Australia, where a pro-woman strategy seems to have dominated the pro-life cause, perhaps because of the power of institutionalised feminism, it has become de rigueur to talk only about the woman and forget the unborn baby at the heart of the matter. So the personhood movement has surprised even our own "sober tacticians".

But does the move for fundamental change on this issue in the US mean anything for the all but failed pro-life cause in Australia, where abortion to term is available in the ACT and Victoria and is set to be decriminalised in Queensland? More to the point, can it mean anything for conservative politicians such as Tony Abbott who, despite his willingness to identify as anti-abortion, is somewhat less willing to identify with the pro-life movement.?

Indeed, Abbott is on record as saying that, like Bill Clinton, he would prefer abortion to be "safe, legal and rare". This remark did not endear him to any conservative pro-lifers, who will not forget that Clinton was the president who legalised partial-birth abortion. Furthermore, Abbott has yet to elaborate on what he would do to make abortion rare in a country with 100,000 abortions a year, one of the highest rates in the world.

Many pro-life advocates believe Abbott's remarks indicate he has been persuaded to shy away from a position that emphasises legislative change and the rights of the child over the suffering of women because, as Nick Tonti-Filippini, a respected ethicist in Melbourne, has said, "It is women who have abortions".

True, but it is the envelope-stuffing pro-lifers who also run pregnancy support centres.

A pro-life activism that concentrates entirely on a woman's rights with no mention of the child is an essentially false argument. It sets up a notion of competing rights, which falls into the feminist pro-choice trap, which in the end won't deliver hearts, minds or legal change. This is not the case in the US where the pro-life and pro-woman cause work in tandem. And the right to life as a human right has gained such momentum.

So why has it not done so well here? Our common-law inheritance makes it almost impossible to to make legislative change based on fundamental human rights, even as defined by the UN Declaration of Human Rights in international law. Where human rights are cited as a vehicle for change, as with the gay marriage debate, it is ideological vaguery, mere rights talk. In fact, human rights bills such as the one in the ACT, which the Greens use as a model legislature, are designed to subvert the human rights of the unborn.

Law and culture separate us from the US but, despite these differences, we should recognise the growing points of similarity. Perhaps as we become more multicultural and less reliant on British precedents, we are more like the US than we think.

Although we are not as religious as the US, we are becoming more religious. The Protestant conservatives, though relatively low-key in Australia, are becoming more politically prominent and, through lobby groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby, are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the pro-life and other conservative causes, most recently gay marriage. There is now a loose alliance between the ACL, other traditionally Catholic-based groups such as the National Civic Council-backed Family Association and pro-life organisations.

Most important of all, the fundamental change in the US, also happening here, is demographic. The pro-life movement in the US has completely changed its face. It is very young. The under-30s cohort, the most pro-choice in the US in the 70s, is now "markedly less" pro-choice than any other generation. One can see a manifestation of this generational shift during the annual pro-life march on Washington. Most are in their 20s, many carrying babies.

Millennials, in Australia and the US, are not more politically conservative but they are much more ethnically diverse and much queasier about abortion. This is the first generation that has seen the ultrasound pictures of themselves, and they see abortion as a basic human rights violation.

Whether the unborn child is valued for its unique potential personhood or more accurately its unique humanness, to deny that the unborn child has any rights is ultimately a futile exercise. At its most visceral emotional level it simply doesn't satisfy our ingrained sensitivity to their fate. This is partly what I call the Juno effect. The young are spontaneously generous and idealistic, they are well informed and they are instinctively repelled by abortion. Politicians, take note.