WOMENS RIGHTS

Women's rights can sometimes be wrong
The Australian
11aug04

RIGHT-TO-LIFERS call them 100,000 murders. Pro-choice feminists call them 100,000 women's choices. For those uncomfortable with either extreme in the abortion debate, we are caught between that feminist rock and a hard place. Feminism's slick slogan of "my body, my choice" won't always cut it. Somewhere in there is the death of a baby. And it has taken a pro-choice film-maker to force a reality check on feminism's holy grail.

Last Sunday, to its credit, the ABC screened My Foetus. The ultimate in reality TV, this gutsy British documentary about abortion has been hailed as the first step towards a new feminism, one that embraces the baby, not just the woman's choice to abort. Producer Julia Black wants to challenge what she calls the "pervasive silence" around abortion. "The pro-choice movement can no longer rely on just arguing abortion is a woman's right," she says. "They have to start engaging in reality." And the reality is that a baby dies.

In some ways the pro-choice Black takes the soft option. She films a doctor carrying out a simple vacuum pump abortion on a woman four weeks pregnant. Most abortions are later. Her camera zooms in on an indistinguishable seven-week-old aborted fetus in a Petri dish. Disturbing pictures of babies aborted at 10, 11 and 21 weeks are consigned to the pro-life movement. Still, her documentary is an important step forward for feminism because many people have stopped listening to the take no prisoners talk of the pro-abortion lobby, eager instead for a new framework that bespeaks the moral gravity of abortion.

Alas, there are those who would have us take two steps back. Pro-choice feminists such as The Sydney Morning Herald's Adele Horin say My Foetus simply provides oxygen to reignite old campaigns. The inference is that the abortion issue is settled, that there is no need for a new debate. After all, says Horin, most women who have had abortions only feel guilty about not feeling guilty.

If she is right, if terminating a life causes no pang of guilt, then the pendulum has surely swung too far and debate is indeed long overdue. And perhaps the 100,000 abortions in Australia each year confirm that life is not always valued as it should be.

It was right to abandon the old extreme view that abortion was always wrong [In principle, it is always wrong. Why would the matter by which the child is conceived affect the humanity and rights of the child? Are we saying that an adult who is the product of rape has less rights than someone else? - GG], that the child's interests always overrode the mother's [In reality their interest are the same. The life of the mother is just as precious. In case of a problem, a doctor should intervene to save both lives - GG]. Cases of rape and incest were but two proofs that simply banning abortion was too simple [It was simple and it worked. Fewer mothers died as a result of "back alley abortions" than die today as a result of abortion complications, because of the sheer number of abortions: 100 times more cases! - GG]. But whiz-bang technology demonstrates that the opposite view -- that a fetus is insufficiently human to have interests weighed against the mothers -- is equally flawed. It started with grainy blue-black images of small feet and beating hearts. New scans, like home videos into the womb, show a 12-week-old baby "walking" in the womb, a baby yawning at 13 weeks and smiling at 18 weeks.

Yet we are now at that other extreme, where a woman's right to choose abortion prevails. So a woman who conceives twins through the marvels of in-vitro fertilisation chooses to abort one because she feels unable to cope with two children. Another woman chooses to abort a baby with a cleft palate at 28 weeks, an age when that baby could survive outside the womb.

Reconciling the rights that attach to two heartbeats in one body is a tough one. But if a baby is viable outside the womb, does a mother have a right to demand that this new life be cut short? In Britain David Steel, the former Liberal leader who introduced the bill that legalised abortion in 1967, is pushing for a change to the UK's 24-week limit.

The Australian reported last month that founding members of the Women's Electoral Lobby, Wendy McCarthy and Eva Cox, support a debate about late-term abortions. Yet when this paper reported that Health Minister Tony Abbott suggested a "political constituency may even be starting to emerge to ban abortions after 20 weeks", Cox shot off an angry letter. She says she will not support any change in legislation to set time limits on a woman's right to an abortion. It seems when push comes to shove, the doctrinaire retreat. So here we are. Back to square one. A woman's right is trumps. No mention of baby.

Too many are crippled by the 1970s politics of abortion and a modern values system increasingly based on the "me" philosophy. How else to explain that adoption has been dumped in favour of abortion? In 1980-81, more than 1500 local children were adopted. Last year, just 78 children were adopted. And we know its not for lack of demand.

Yet the very notion of sacrifice -- even for nine months -- to save a life seems unthinkable these days. Is adoption even canvassed as a serious option when a pregnant woman receives counselling? While the decision to give a child up for adoption is a truly heart-wrenching one, why is terminating that life treated as the easy solution?

It is easy because old, angry feminists peddle a false choice of easy abortion v traumatic adoption. In reality, there is no easy choice. Both are, and should be, difficult. New voices such as Black's may not resolve the dreadful dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy but they at least remind us there are two lives at stake here.