ABORT THIS ARGUMENT

There are some cold, harsh winds of change howling down the so-called “hallowed halls” in Washington and Canberra this week after the thumping victory of George W. Bush and the confirmation that John Howard will have control of the Senate for the first time in more than twenty years.

The religious right is on the move. In America Bush strategists got out several million “family values” religious voters who sat on their hands back in 2000 and he scored the biggest popular vote in American presidential history.

He creamed John Kerry and the Democrats in the so-called “Bible belt” of the South and the mid-west. Here, in Australia, Victoria elected a political debutante from the Family First party. Sure. Stephen Fleming got less than two per cent of the primary vote (which makes our preferential trickle-down system a pathetic joke) but he will get to sit in the Senate for six years come July.

And in Queensland the last National to snare a Senate seat, Barnaby Joyce, is already making some ultra-conservative religious demands if he is to be wooed over things like the sale of Telstra.

To me this is an ominous spreading amoeba in both the US and Australia. A further blurring of the supposed separation of church and state.

A good example is the first item back in the headlines on the new agenda: abortion. The Federal Government, aided by the “God botherers” wants this debate back on the agenda. Why?

It wasn’t an election issue. I can’t remember it even getting a mention. And I though this debate had been sanely settled years ago. And yet Acting Prime Minister John Anderson has claimed that the number of abortions has “ got out of hand”. Not true. Health Minister Tony Abbott says we are in the middle of an abortion epidemic. Not true. And remember, this is from a man who had a partner give up a child for adoption when he was a young man.

That is not a cheap shot. I have no details of the circumstances of the mother of that child. And neither should I. The decision for her to carry that foetus into a baby and then give birth and have him or her adopted was her decision. And that’s the point. It was HER decision – aided and guided or maybe even pressured by a partner.

Abortion, the termination of a pregnancy, must be a woman’s decision. Helped, you hope, by loving friends and family but too often abandoned to a cruel, real, and often heartless world. It angers me when moralists

(usually men) don’t accept or understand what a woman goes through before deciding to terminate a pregnancy. Don’t understand during and after such a traumatic decision.

It is not a decision for a man to make. We don’t have to spend nine months gestating. We don’t know the physical, emotional, financial problems facing a wouldbe mother. And I won’t go into the other ghastly world of incest and rape victims.

To end a pregnancy must be a woman’s choice. A decision between her and her doctor. I think it is sick, cruel and emotional blackmail for people like Family First to insist that any Australian woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy must first see an ultrasound of the foetus. Must

(presumably by law) be given advice about maternal depression, grief and possible sterilisation.

These guys make Margaret Tighe sound like a libertarian. And the person who angers me more than the peripheral but potentially dangerous Family Firsters is Tony Abbott. He is the federal Health Minister. He has been relentlessly pushing his personal religious agenda.

John Howard can duck it – while cleverly not alienating religious zealots – by claiming that Abbott’s statements are his “personal views” and not Government policy. Since the Government’s re-election that coyness won’t wash. People like Abbott and some National Senators and the Family Firsters really do want to change Medicare funding for pregnancy terminations. So does John Anderson. So does the new Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Christopher Pyne and the Special Minister of State Eric Abetz.

Women of Australia (as Gough Whitlam might have said) be warned a posse of right-wing men are coming after you. And they are hypocrites.

I mentioned the Abbott child out of wedlock. I remember that self-centred Tasmanian Senator, Brian Harridine, who often held the balance of power and pork-barrelled the Howard Government to death, relentlessly opposed IVF programmes.

Especially even a hint of federal funding. I discovered that this same man who would deprive a couple the chance of a child actually had thirteen of his own. Some were stepchildren but the point is still valid.

He also opposed the “morning after” contraception insurance pill. Figure that one out. They don’t want you to have an abortion but they also don’t want you to go to the chemist and get a pill to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.

I deliberately call some of our politicians hypocrites because of the Lusher Amendment. It was about twenty-five years ago and the mover of the bill, Stephen Lusher, has thankfully disappeared from our political landscape. There was a conscience voter about abortion on the floor of the House. From memory, back then, there was not one female member in the House of Reps.

Male after male got up to passionately argue about the sanctity of life and the evils of abortion. I watched them. I knew some of the most passionate speakers had paid for secretaries and other office staff to have terminations. I knew of one who had sent his mistress off for an abortion in a Commonwealth car at taxpayers’ expense.

Beware the politician who wraps himself in the flag and his religion. There is a real danger, I believe, of that happening again now in Australia and the United States. I’ll concede I may be showing a bias because I am an atheist but I fervently believe that no man has the right to make decisions about a woman and her body.

And the danger is that this is such an emotional, tearing issue. One of the heaps of e-mails I received this week said:

“As I listened to you today on radio I thought of how you go into bat for children who are abused and yet you condone abortion. Derryn, this is not only abuse but murder. A baby is a baby is a baby from conception.”

Abbott and Fielding and Co are playing with deep and dangerous emotions here. To me it is between a woman and her doctor.

November 7, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004