Jane Caro on the new threats to abortion rights in Australia
With the issue of abortion being raised again in multiple states, and with the Adelaide Advertiser's irresponsible support of hardline anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe's "Baby-Killers Club" hit list -- not to mention the ongoing attempts to decimate abortion rights in the US -- it seems it's time again to defend the right to choose.
Under the existing South Australian legislation, abortions after 22 weeks and six days are allowed in extreme circumstances where there is significant risk to mother or fetus. Under the recently defeated bill proposed by Liberal MP Ben Hood, a woman needing an abortion after 27 weeks and six days would have had to either keep the baby or adopt it out.
SA Health data shows that in 2023, fewer than 1% of terminations (47) were performed after that stage, but fewer than five were performed after 27 weeks. This is not a procedure that occurs often, nor is it resorted to lightly.
As CNN recently reported, in the year and a half following the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to abortion, hundreds more infants died than expected in the United States. The vast majority of those infants had birth defects. These are the cases in which late-term abortion would typically have been employed to prevent trauma and health risks to mothers, and the birth of babies too damaged to survive.
The reasons behind this new resurgence in anti-abortion activity might be various but all too often the issue -- and the health of women -- is used as a political or moral football by those seeking to bolster or exercise power and control.
NSL ambassador Jane Caro weighs in on the issue below.
For reasons that have more to do with American politics than anything relevant to Australia, abortion rights are back on the agenda. In both Queensland and South Australia, rights that women thought were finally settled are being challenged by those who want to control women.
We know that Australian women and men overwhelmingly support a woman’s right to choose, understanding that bodily autonomy is the first and greatest liberty.
Women do not lose their human rights when they become pregnant. They do not instantly become the moral or legal equivalent of a handful of cells. They are not containers, or mere portals through which other human beings enter the world. They are sentient adults who must be trusted to make their own decisions about their own bodies and their own future.
To force someone to gestate and give birth against their will is to literally colonise their body. It reduces women to a status below that of a dead body, where permission to use a cadaver’s organs to help another live must be given prior to death.
And late term abortion is a furphy cruelly used by Forced Birthers to further their political and religious agenda. Abortions after 24 weeks are vanishingly rare and always a tragedy. It’s almost always a wanted pregnancy gone horribly wrong, with a fetus too malformed to be compatible with life, or a mother whose life is threatened if the pregnancy continues.
Anyone who thinks women sit around for months while pregnant and then decide to abort late in the pregnancy on a whim has no idea how traumatic the process is and has the lowest possible opinion of women, not to mention their medical practitioners. To pass such judgements on families facing such an ordeal, to want to legislate to make it even harder than it already is, is to legislate a form of psychological and moral torture.
Australia is better than this.