Solidarity Salon, Sydney Rd
Tues March 11

Susie Allanson, Debbie Brennan, Carlene Wilson, Liz Patterson

Susie Allanson:

• Don’t want to just transfer the Menhennitt ruling (see previous blog) to the crimes act.
• Women should not have to be signed off by two or more doctors-no more hoops-self determination.
• Demeaning processes
• Full removal from crimes act
• Women to be respected as decision-makers
• There is a range of positions from politicians who call themselves pro choice in terms of what conditions they put on a woman’s reproductive rights.
• Ignorance-stigmatised issue-silenced
• Turn abstract in to personal-if it were your wife/daughter/sister
• Freedom of information. Natasha Stott Despoja taking up the issue-truth in advertising
• Won’t change anti-choicers picketing and carrying out demeaning protests.
• Protestors intimidate using pictures and disturbing slogans. For women who have lived with a history of violence, it can be triggering and intimidating.
• Security guard killed in 2001 inside abortion clinic.

Susie has written a book called ‘Murder on His Mind’ about the killing of the Clinic’s security guard in 2001. She has kindly donated this book to the Wom*n’s Room.

Liz

• Noted: Very witty opening
• Disconnection between slogans and ‘woman’
• Need to demonstrate relevance and context
• Need to be talking about women’s rights and feminism
• Strategically valuable.
• Short term goals and long-term strategies
• Woman centred campaign
• To be continued…

Carlene Wilson

• Struggle in a feminised profession (teaching)
• Women’s work-undervalued
• The reason that many women are in professions such as teaching is an active reproductive choice-fits in with family.
• Women are forced in to career choices which offer them 7 yrs maternity leave
• People are not aware that abortion is illegal
• Broad conservatism within levels of society
• Many anti-choicers are normal bigoted people
• Peoples bodies are the only ones to stop picketers at the clinic
• Putting faith on legal system which is not on our side
• Police equally heavy to deal with anti and pro choicers.

Debbie

RW IWD Forum
Decriminalise Abortion: Women Demand the Right to Decide!
March 11, 2008

What kind of society would make abortion a crime, punishable up to 10 years in prison for the woman and the doctor? Where would you see health clinics that provide abortion services having to protect themselves with security guards? Or other clinics having to close their doors because they’ve been defunded? Where women with particular types of immigration status aren’t allowed access to any reproductive services — pre-natal, post-natal, nothing. It’s the same sort of society that does not guarantee freely accessible childcare and denies two-thirds of working women paid maternity leave entitlements. We’re talking about a country with a shameful history of taking children away from women because they are poor, Indigenous or have a disability — or forcibly sterilising women for these same reasons. A place where lesbians only recently won access to assisted reproductive technology after a long and determined campaign. A very rich country where 10% of its population lives in poverty. Where children, allegedly in whose interest abortion is criminalized, live in households that can’t afford gas for heating, food or dental treatment, let alone a house. In 2003-2004, 60 percent of these homes relied on welfare – and it would be more now. Eighty-seven percent of single parent households are headed by mothers. And these mothers get especially cruel treatment under the system of “mutual obligation” that forces them into low-paid jobs and the double burden of looking after their kids at the same time, without any support. It’s a society where Indigenous children are used yet again as a weapon in a vicious attack on their communities, like those of the Northern Territory, where welfare is “quarantined” for alleged abuse or neglect — bringing back the mission days. Where racism is so easily used to then go after all parents on welfare. It’s a society that’s so misogynist that its workforce is one of the most sex-segregated in the world: women are concentrated in the worst paid, most casualised jobs and, overall, earn 16% less than men doing the same work.

It’s an indictment on countries like Australia that this sums up “reproductive rights” for women. Tonight, we’re discussing Victoria’s abortion laws and what it will take to turn abortion from being a crime into being a freely available procedure, on demand, through a well-funded and resourced public health system. It’s shameful that 39 years on, the Menhennit ruling of 1969 remains the extent of women’s ability to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Why should a woman have to put up a special hardship case for an abortion? Why should a doctor make the decision, and not her? What’s worse, as long as this ruling sits alongside the Crimes Act, which can send the woman and her doctor to jail, then it’s a very precarious right indeed. We only have to look at a case a couple of years ago in New South Wales, which has similar abortion laws, where a doctor was convicted of performing an unlawful miscarriage. Or the four-year-long witch-hunt of staff at the Royal Women’s Hospital for performing a termination at 32 weeks. No wonder doctors aren’t going into this field of practice! At any time, the criminal code can be pulled out and thrown at any woman and her doctor – as was the case with the Royal Women’s. In 2002, anti-abortion senator, Julian McGauran, launched the persecution which ultimately forced the hospital to hand over the woman’s file. This is when later term abortions, which are less than 2% and required because of desperate situations, were targeted by the anti-abortion camp as an attack on access to all abortions. The doctors were eventually cleared, but the message to abortion practitioners is chillingly clear.

Last October, after attempts by two individual ALP women members of parliament – Caroline Hirsch in 2006 and Candy Broad in 2007 – to decriminalise abortion, Premier Brumby instructed the Victorian Law Reform Commission to investigate Victoria’s abortion laws and come up with recommendations that would give them clarity and consistency. It’s not a given that the commission will recommend the decriminalisation of abortion. Brumby himself opposed the Broad bill. In fact, there was an alternative bill to remove abortion from the Crimes Act and insert it as a crime within the Health Act. The Menhennit ruling would also have been inserted in the Act. This bill did not get publicity, but it is what Brumby and the other senior ALP ministers – Steve Bracks, Bronwyn Pike and Rob Hulls — must have been referring to when they kept talking about putting abortion into the Health Act. That Broad and Hirsch had been pressured by their party leaders to withdraw their bills shows how influential the anti-abortion forces are.

And they are organised! Apparently, the majority of submissions sent to the reform commission came from anti-abortion groups and individuals. CWRR saw how organised – and violent – they are, just before the Broad Bill was going to parliament. At the end of June last year, CWRR found out about a Rally for the Rights of the Unborn just two days beforehand. CWRR put out a call for a counter-demo on the steps of parliament. There were 30 of us and about 300 of them. Despite the thuggery from their side – while the cops looked on! – we drowned them out. But that experience tells our side that we must be better organised than they are. When the commission releases its recommendations, whatever they are, we have to hit the streets, organise public meetings and mobilise in every way we can. We have to bring out the 80%-plus of the population that believes that choosing abortion should be every woman’s right. Only a linking up of movements – students, unions, queers, feminists – and the general community can make this happen. Just think of the 2004 March for Women’s Lives that brought together over a million pro-choice women and men in the biggest march on Washington in U.S. history. Or the 1993 near general strike against Kennett which was so big, the city was like a sardine can of striking workers and community.

We need to be clear what it is that we’re fighting. Why are the laws so archaic and barbaric? Why have governments resisted decriminalisation? Why do the religious and moralistic Neanderthals have more say than women and the majority of Victorians? It’s because profit rules our society and calls the shots. We are up against a system that needs women back in the home breeding the next generation of skilled labor and caring for its existing workforce – all for free! As workers, we’re used by the system to set the lowest benchmark of wages and conditions for all workers in capitalism’s race to the bottom line. The pro-business Brumby government is going to resist decriminalisation. It is certainly going to resist free, safe abortion on demand. We are going to have to fight hard for it! But we can take heart from the inspiring victory of the campaign by Victorian lesbians and their allies for equal access to assisted reproductive technology and for legal parenting recognition for non-birth mothers in same-sex relationships. They campaigned tenaciously for five years — against the same misogynist, homophobic opposition. Their victory is a breakthrough for abortion rights.

We are in an historic period. It’s crunch time for many things – from reproductive rights to union and Indigenous rights. It’s no coincidence that the profit system targets women, unionists and the traditional owners of this country. It has prospered through its theft of our labor, our bodies, our lives and the lands of this country’s first nations. For women, there will be no reproductive justice until we have full recognition and rights as equal players in how our society is run. No one will benefit from a system that cannot accommodate this justice — because it’s a system that also cannot deliver decent health, education, transport, housing, jobs – not to mention an environment that is safe and a world that is free from poverty and war. Reproductive justice belongs to everyone, and winning abortion rights would be a huge leap toward winning it.