Today is Blog for Choice day
Rights, Sexual politics, Values - - Posted on January, 22 at 6:24 pm by Helen
Blog for Choice day is an initiative of NARAL, the US pro-choice organisation. The website which showcases the event is called Bush v. Choice. This Blog for Choice day also marks 35 years since the Roe vs Wade decision which protected abortion rights for women in the US.
But it’s impossible to spend any time in the US feminist or political blogs without realising that the US religious right - which has been making increasing inroads into our country as well - has been threatening Roe v. Wade for some time. Pumped-up anti-choice organisations have been encircling women and their health providers, always alert for an opening or a sign of weakness. It’s not just the violence that happens around US abortion clinics. The legal and political challenges are circling around them as well, hackles raised, teeth showing, ready to pounce.
So, Blog for Choice day, where we stop and think about the abortion wars and how they’re nowhere near won, and what we can do about it.
I’m going to leave the US now though, to talk about Australia and Melbourne where I live, and the doctor who has been put through a trial by fire by an unscrupulous politician and the rest of the circling, snarling rabble of abortion opponents.
It’s a continuation of the story about the one extreme edge case of late abortion which was made into a cause celebre by MP Julian McGauran, who didn’t hesitate to trample all over the rights of the woman in question and her doctors.
Now the doctor who performed the abortion has outed himself, with articles in the Bulletin and other news outlets. His name is Professor Lachlan de Crespigny (and, oddly enough, I remember him from prenatal exams at the RWH when I was pregnant with Boychild.) He has also been speaking publicly in support of a change of legislation to entrench womens’ right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy. The anti-abortionists have done their best to ruin his life.
“It just took over my life,” he says. “It’s better now in that I don’t think about it all day every day, but I think about it a lot every day … I still wake up at night and I still lie awake thinking about it every night. It used to be for hours every night. But now I switch off and go back to sleep far more quickly.”
Most of his anger is directed at the hospital. A few months after the woman’s abortion, the hospital called a news conference to reveal the events that had transpired.
Professor de Crespigny says the news conference was called after a number of doctors told hospital administration what had happened. He was sacked first, then suspended. Five other doctors were also suspended. The suspensions were soon lifted and the doctors were able to return to work. But, because of a feeling of being wronged at least in Professor de Crespigny’s case, none of the doctors work at the hospital now.
According to the Bulletin article, because of the personal toll this six-year witch hunt has taken on him, Professor de Crespigny will retire this year at 61 (he expected to work into his eighties, as his father had done.) I can well believe it, because he appears to have most of the signs of post traumatic stress.
The corollary, of course, is clear. De Crespigny and other health professionals have been made an example of, to send a message to others. So, although on paper Australian women may have reasonable legal access to abortion, in practice, the numbers of surgeons willing to perform the procedure will fall and de facto access will be more and more restricted.
Doctors are right to be anxious about performing a legal abortion. Because of recent police and coroner’s investigations, court cases and press coverage of abortion cases, more doctors now refuse a request for abortion. This environment unreasonably denies women abortion, and it exposes women and their doctors to unpredictable legal risk and public exposure. A system is flawed when a doctor’s first priority cannot be the welfare of her or his patient.
And, as I pointed out here, although seven years have now passed since his crusade began, Julian McGauran - the MP who started it all - hasn’t been able to find another example of a late-term abortion conducted for psychiatric reasons. The number of late-term abortions conducted for purely frivolous reasons, of course, remains at zero. People’s lives have been ruined because of a late-term abortion epidemic that exists only in his imagination.
Blog for Choice day should be an occasion for all of us, Australians as well as Americans, to stop and consider how the circling, snarling anti-choicers are ripping away at our right to our bodily autonomy bit by bit. We can only stop it by looking outward, and doing what we can to chase off the circling predators. We also need to help to drag those predators off the targets they have singled out as particularly tasty.
So I’d like to offer a huge cyber-bouquet to Professor Lachlan de Crespigny, feminist ally and courageous supporter of human rights.
I’ll update this post later with links to other Blog for Choice day posts. Comments vilifying the people mentioned in this post will be disemvowelled. If you think this denies your freedom of speech, don’t hesitate to get your own blog.
Update 23/01/2008:
Jill Filipovic of Feministe lists 10 reasons to support reproductive justice on Roe day.
Alternet has a Reproductive Justice section with a massive link farm of Blog for Choice day posts.
There’s a group essay up at Salon.com as well.
I can’t find anything on the Australian feminist blogs for BFC day, but I’ll take the oportunity to plug this wonderful article by Audrey Apple, and the followup here and here. Big “awwwwww!” moment in the third link.
Update 24/01/2008:
Add some blue milk to the mix. BM points out that the Blog for Choice organisers had a specific theme, which doesn’t really relate to Australia. My approach was simply to ignore it!
And this post from Lauredhel isn’t a Blog for Choice day post, but I thought it was too important to leave out.
Crossposted at the Balcony
Posted in Rights, Sexual politics, Values |
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Good on you Helen.
You don’t have to identify as a feminist in this country to be pro-choice, thank goodness, but the lunatics are banging on the Administration Office door of the asylum.
At the moment we have a relatively sane attitude towards abortion in Australia, but there’s no guarantee things will either stay the way they are or improve any. The RU486 moment was an important one, but you’re right, there are always nutjobs at the ready to torture and ruin others in their crusade against the imaginary.
McGauran for GG. Quickest way in this country to get ignored.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Late term (4 mths plus) abortions may be rare, but only because of the difficulty obtaining them because of the reluctance of doctors to perform them and of women to seek them.
Denial is a very human characteristic and we are all able to deny facts about our bodies, including that we are pregnant, when we desperately, for diverse reasons, do not want to be, or are capable of accepting, and acting upon the fact that an alternative does exist in the form of abortion.
And by the time pregnancy is established, through medical verification usually, the difficulty in obtaining an abortion at even four months, and the seeming inevitability of the pregnancy, naturally results in many women giving birth to babies they do not want and/or are not in a position, economically, socially, personally or psychologically to properly or adequately care for.
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:16 am
I find these anti-abortion people deplorable. The sheer arrogance of these people that they believe that they should enforce their narrow-minded ideology on everyone is staggering.
They should mind their own business and look after their own backyard.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:18 am
let the anti abortionists win (in the US)…and see what havoc they will release upon their society…..i don’t think such “laws” would stick aournd for long…..
of course i don’t wish such a thing, but how else will these peopel ever understand????
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
This is one of the important reasons for Americans to put a Democrat in the White House. Alito and Roberts, Bush’s Supreme Court appointments, are going to be there for a long time, but the more liberal members are getting pretty old. There’s almost certainly going to be at least one appointment in the next four years. Americans living in Australia are eligible to vote, including in the primaries, and can do so via Vote from Abroad, or should contact their local chapter of Democrats Abroad Australia.
A public service message.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:48 am
The issue of abortion doesn’t fit into the traditional partisan issue configuration in the US. Women legislators of both parties tend to support legal abortion more than the men of both parties and Democratic women are the most active supporters. Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant legislators of both sexes and legislators who have many Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants in their districts give less support to abortion, however.
Members of Congress and their counterparts in state legislators are under intense pressure over their votes on abortion legislation. The pressure comes from a well-financed and well-organised set of conservative religious groups that continue to seek to limit or eliminate access to abortion and have been relatively successful in this even though most Americans support abortion.
The issue demonstrates how a disciplined minority can affect politics when small changes in voter preferences can alter the outcome of elections.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Geez Helen, you mentioned “the US religious right - which has been making increasing inroads into our country as well …”
Only nuclear devastation or the extinction of the planet (both of which are quite possible) would be worse than this news, because the US Religious Right is INSANITY personified.
Alistair is damn right, they’re deplorable, arrogant and narrow minded.
Lyn’s comments “At the moment we have a relatively sane attitude towards abortion in Australia, but there’s no guarantee things will either stay the way they are or improve any ..” is sadly prescient. Any pregnant woman hoping to have an abortion in Australia in the future might be doomed by the ongoing idiocy and so-called ‘culture’ that we continue to adopt from the USA - Unhinged States of Absurdity, where the armies of anti-choice frothing fruito’s are the very LAST examples of any beliefs or ideals that other world countries should ever adopt.
January 23rd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Great comments - of course there’s a whole nother blog post or rather a SERIES of them about the religious right and to what extent is the RR imported from the US? The exclusive brethren, I believe, splintered off from the Plymouth brethren (cos the latter weren’t pure enough, of course)
I know there are links between the RR and the Libs but haven’t done the research. And then of course there is Opus dei and Abbott etc. Opus Dei is also influential in the Labor right.
There was an interesting article on Webdiary (remember webdiary?) back in 2003 or 2004, about a visit from some US fundies to Australia and their cosy relationship to the Howard government, I will try to dig it up.
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:08 pm
The Righteous Brothers
“Pokies Cloud over McGaurans”.
The Australian. October 9th.2007.
Patricia Karvelas.
The Millers Inn Hotel.
‘Community Support Fund’ McGauran(Altona)Pty.Ltd.
Good old National/liberal ethics.
January 24th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Thanks for the link Helen. In amongst all the garbage I’ve received, it’s been great to see such support across the blogosphere.
A woman with distinctly churchy, i-was-educated-in-the-fifties handwriting sent me a hard copy of my article in the mail the other day. She’d carefully clipped it out, and taken the time to write across the top:
“I hope you burn in hell…And I’m sure you will.”
Every word was individually underlined. You know, just in case I didn’t get the extent of her dementia.
I think I might frame it…
But there are always silver linings! On the same day, a 78 year old woman wrote to tell me I was her heroine, and that she struggled as a young woman whenever the priest talked about the poor dead little babies. She could only think about the women that might be better off now. I really felt for her - she was born in the wrong time, that’s for sure.
January 26th, 2008 at 12:03 am
great post, Helen. i did want to write something for BfC too after i read your post the other night, as i happened to be reading some very wacky George Pell that touched on the subject. unfortunately i didn’t get a chance as i’ve been sick this week, but i want to try and post something on it sometime (sigh).
and yeah, well done to Audrey for her chutzpah. it’s just sad that it’s 2008 and there’s still that taboo there, whereby openly speaking about having had an abortion requires chutzpah in the first place…