Helen at Surfdom blogged on Blog for Choice Day (which happened a couple of days ago), with the tale of Professor Lachlan de Crespigny. Just go read it.
In Victoria, at least, we are inching towards abortion law reform. A private members’ Bill by Labor upper house MP Candy Broad was withdrawn, after then-new Premier John Brumby announced that he supported the change and referred the matter to the Victorian Law Reform Commission to determine the best way to reform the law. That inquiry is to report to the Attorney-General by March 28 this year, to be released to Parliament within two weeks of that date. The local branch of the Liberal Party - or, at least, their leadership - is quite supportive of the change, with both Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu and deputy Louise Asher publicly supporting decriminalization.
It’s too late to put a submission in to the VLRC inquiry, but there is plenty of time to plan lobbying for the inevitable conscience vote. With any luck, change in Victoria might serve as a model for other states. The anti-abortion crowd will undoubtedly flood our MP’s with mail. Some going the other way might stiffen the resolve of a few nervous nellies…
Here are two predictions.
1. The bill decriminalising abortion will pass easily.
2. A greater proportion of Liberal MPs than Labor MPs will support it.
I’m confused about this. I thought that abortion was legal in Australia.
Abortion has not been removed from the Criminal Code, Alastair - not in Victoria and not everywhere else in Oz, either. There has been a workaround on a sort of technicality in most jurisdictions, requiring a form being signed by a doctor attesting that the woman needs the abortion for the sake of her mental health, which provides a legal exception to the criminal act of abortion, thus no prosecutions are made.
But while the Criminal Statute regarding abortion remains on the books, there is no recognition of the principle of abortion on demand, i.e. a rational decision by the pregnant woman regarding her capacity to complete the pregnancy in her own unique circumstances: the technicality requires the fiction of a woman pushed to near madness by the thought of giving birth. It’s demeaning and infantilising, and would also take only a decision by a future anti-choice Attorney General to prosecute (and a decision in the prosecution’s favour by a sympathetic judge) for the current system of women’s access to abortion to be severely curtailed.
Of course, under these laws only the doctors providing the abortions will be prosecuted. There is no allowance for charging the woman who hires the doctor to perform the abortion with any offense as I understand it. Bizarre when you think about it.
Thanks for the link Robert.
Alastair,
What Tigtog said - there is a perception in Australia that abortion IS legal - I had that impression when I was younger. However, it’s still on the criminal code, with an important “out” - the Menhennit ruling It’s the Menhennit ruling, rather than Roe Vs Wade, on which our access to abortion hinges in Australia. Just look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more. There’s a great article on the history of Menhennit in a recent Monthly, but it’s behind a paywall.
Thanks, Helen. I’d forgotten the name: Menhennit Ruling. Also, Abortion in Australia.
Thanks for the enlightening info tigtog and Helen. Glad to know what the law really is. I totally agree that all criminalisation with regard to abortion should be removed. It’s quite disgraceful that it was ever there in the first place.
Bizarre? I think it has its own internal logic. It carries through the notion of the woman’s body as object: a thing with no agency, the site of a transaction between active subjects (doctors and lawyers, say) and nothing more than that.
Any literal-minded objector who wants to pop in and pipe up that some doctors and lawyers are women are referred to Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, for which I thank Tigtog on an almost daily basis.
Exactly. (I was trying to be all Socratic and shit)
Thanks for the props, too.