After sitting on it for an eternity, the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s report into abortion law reform has finally been tabled. The Age has an article here which provides a quick summary of the three proposed options. Very briefly, The first would be to, essentially, encapsulate the Menhennitt ruling into legislation, by requiring a doctor to decide that continuing a pregnancy poses harm to the mother. The second would legalize abortion on request up to 24 weeks, but require the doctor’s agreeance of harm of continuing the pregnancy beyond that. The third would remove all criminal sanctions entirely. The full report – which I haven’t yet had time to read – is here.
The Greens have come out in support of the third, most liberal option. Both major parties will be having a conscience vote; both premier John Brumby and Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu have supported decriminalization, but haven’t announced which option they will support yet. But, of course, it’s not the leaders that matter this time around. It’s all those backbenchers.
As noted the last time this came up, anti-abortion types will flood our MPs with mail. Let’s make sure they get some supporting change to stiffen their resolve a bit.
Here’s an excellent link on this important issue.
Thanks for that Paul Norton. I just joined. It will be interesting to se which option gets the guernsey. Abortion law reform was difficult under Bracks because he was such a Catholic social conservative. I don’t think Brumby carries a similar sort of baggage.
Fine, as bad as Catholic social conservatives are on this issue, I think Protestant social conservatives are worse, for reasons which have to do with the basic psychological differences between Protestants (especially of the Puritan/nonconformist/evangelical denominations) and Catholics.
I’ve mailed my local member requesting that he vote to support decriminalisation. However, I’ve noticed that last year he presented a petition to the legislative assembly from some local residents requesting the opposite. So I may need to do some further work in trying to convince him.
I had a quick look at the links – they didn’t seem to mention if there was any difference between the requirements of an abortion after 24 weeks – that point presumably being chosen because fetuses are viable after that point.
I’m just wondering if a further compromise position may be that after 24 weeks (or maybe later around 30-32 weeks when it really is very viable) that rather than killing the fetus if there is no increased risk to the woman, they deliver the fetus alive rather than kill it (it has to come out regardless).
Paul,
I would think that the Protestant / Catholic thing is just a difference of semantics. Muslims tend to be just as emphatic on the question as well. You could add in almost every single religious or moral position (including atheism) into there.
To me, the religious / moral question boils down to when you believe life begins, with three possible positions being conception, viability or at first breath. The political / criminal position boils down to when you believe there is a life that is the State’s duty to protect with similar possible options.
To me it really is that simple.
I think you mean differences in worldview, rather than psychology, Paul. I hope you don’t think religious belief* changes an individual’s psychology.
*Leaving extreme or isolating cults out of this
Of course is one is a woman, it isn’t, and can’t ever be. If ‘life begins’ at either conception or viability, then it immediately becomes less simple, unless you entirely discount the mother and the rest of her own life.
‘… if one is a woman …’
As well as Pavlov’s points: do you apply the religious or the medical concept of ‘conception’? i.e. the moment that the zygotes begin to form a unique recombination of DNA, or the successful implantation of the blastocyst into the uterine lining that initiates the production of pregnancy hormones?
Pavlov’s Cat,
Apologies if I seemed insensitive there. I know a few women who had to make that decision and I know it was, and remains, a very difficult decision for them (and sometimes their partners) to have taken – whichever way it turned out.
I believe the important thing here, though, is to try to reduce the emotional parts of this discussion, as both sides tend to try to swing the debate using highly emotionally charged arguments, which IMHO only serve to polarise the debate.
While some of the participants in the argument do not feel (and may never be) able to move away from the purely emotional elements of the debate, I do not believe an emotionally charged means of arriving at a decision is likely to create good public policy.
Equally, I do not see Paul’s attempt to try to create a “Catholics are better than Protestants” argument to be useful.
If I was trying to make such a general argument it would indeed not be useful. I was making a more limited point about a particular category (social conservatives who obsess about opposing abortion) within each denomination. I have also become increasingly uneasy with the “Catholics are worse than everyone else” mindset which often appears in relation to issues of this kind.
FWIW I think that these days we would find pro-choice majorities across all the Christian denominations taken as a whole, and also as large or perhaps a larger pro-choice majority amongst Jews (who were found to be more pro-choice than Christians in a US survey in the 1970s which I once read about).
I will leave my response to Liam to another thread, rather than get this one too off topic.
Quite right Paul. Sorry Rob for the derail, sorry all commenters.
Andrew, “emotion” and “emotional” used four times in two paragraphs in the above. “Emotional”, in Australia, is code for “hysterical, can’t think.” You also refer to “both sides” as if the pro-and anti-choice groups were equivalent in their level of knowledge and approach. They aren’t. On the one side you have knowledgeable and responsible people like Leslie Cannold, Lachlan de Crespigny, and pro-choice organisations and writers like Marilyn Beaumont of Womens Health Victoria (writing in the AGE today). Feminists, while being portrayed as frothing radicals by the popular imagination, write soberly and factually on the subject (see Tigtog, above, and have a look at Alternet, Katha Pollitt, Cannold etc.)
On the other, you have nutters like Margaret Tighe, Nic White, Rodney what’s his face and the kind of people who bomb abortions clinics in the states. You can’t tell me there is equivalence there.
The Australian equation of “emotional” with “irrational, invalid” always gets up my goat. Prof. Lachlan de Crespigny knows more than most people about abortion. He has also had his life and career ruined by the antichoice zealots. I think he should be allowed a bit of emotion, don’t you?
Andrew, if it’s ‘emotional’ to point out that there are (at least) two bodies involved in every abortion, then I don’t quite see how it can be avoided. I certainly don’t think Tigtog’s point was ‘emotional’. But if you’re going to make a statement like ‘It’s that simple’ and then merely dismiss any objection as ‘emotional’, then that’s not going to make good policy either, surely.
This isn’t about being ‘insensitive’ (and I have no personal stake in the issue myself, thank Goddess); it’s about the androcentric point of view that renders the woman invisible in the terms of that debate and talks only about the embryo. The only emotion in my argument so far is exhausted frustration that after forty years of having this pointed out, many male commentators on the abortion issue still seem unable to take it in.
The strongest emotion I’ve felt here so far has been the momentary but visceral sensation of horror when I first saw the heading on this post. For a horrible minute I thought the issue was about the legislation going backwards.
OK – I do not find a comparison between a particular category of members of each church to be useful. It is (IMHO) irrelevant. You may as well try to discuss a Muslim response to abortion and then follow it up with the policies of Ceaucescu’s Romania.
Relevance? Zip.
I appreciate you were following up Fine’s comment – but that one reads just as well with the word “Catholic” removed.
Please, everyone, be careful how you express yourselves on what remains a pretty highly-charged topic.
Helen,
While I acknowledge there are certainly “nutters” on the anti-choice side, I do not accept your apparent attempt to typify all of them (yes – “them”, not “us”) as “nutters”. The RC Archbishop of Rome (aka the Pope) for example, I would not call anything less than “knowledgable and responsible”. There are many people that I can respect on both sides of this debate and your seeming attempt to classify the anti-choice side as “nutters” while the pro-choice side is called “knowledgeable and responsible” is just the sort of emotional baggage that, wielded by either side, I believe sets the whole thing on the path down to radicalism. It also helps the “nutters” to excuse (at least to themselves) actions such as the bombing of abortion clinics.
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Pavlov’s Cat,
I was trying to point out that, while an individual’s (or a couple’s) decision to seek an abortion is almost bound to be emotionally charged, any attempt to inject that emotional charge into the making of public policy is just as bound to lead to bad policy.
Another attempt to frame what the issue is about. Should someone who is unequivocally a human person have the right to determine her own life compromised in the supposed interests of an entity which, until the 24th week of pregnancy, is incapable of being a person (and thus of having interests) even in theory, and which, after that time until birth, is incapable of being a person in practice?
Paul Norton, I didn’t mean to impley that Catholics are somehow ‘worse’ on this issue, just that Bracks Catholicism helped drive the State Govt’s agenda. Sorry, if it was taken another way.
Word to PC at 15. Why do women’s bodies still get erased out this debate? Why is it being ‘emotional’ to raise the issue? What’s wrong with emotion, in any case?
I also get a bit annoyed by the idea that women find the decision to have an abortion an incredibly difficult one. Some women do. Some women don’t. It buys into the idea that there’s something psychologically inherently damaging about having an abortion.
No, I don’t think the position of the Catholic church and its office bearers on abortion is rational at all, Andrew. The Church opposes both abortion and contraception, both on the basis of religion. Not helping.
“… I believe sets the whole thing on the path down to radicalism.”
Andrew Reynolds, what do you mean by ‘radicalism’?
And in what way is the Pope knowledgeable and responsible about abortion?
I wonder about the Pope being ‘knowledgeable and responsible’ when the RC church is against both abortion and contraception.
Having nailed my personal philosophical colours to the mast at #19, there is another dimension to this issue. Even if one is personally convinced that abortion is morally problematic, at least after certain stages of pregnancy, is it good public policy in a pluralistic democracy to attempt to enshrine such a conviction as the law of the land?
I guess I’m not that interested in discussing the ethics of abortion. To me it’s done and dusted and I’m not that interested in attempting to persuade people who think otherwise.
I’m more interested in ensuring that there’s changes to the damn legislation.
Andrew states that to him “the religious / moral question [simply] boils down to when you believe life begins, with three possible positions being conception, viability or at first breath. The political / criminal position boils down to when you believe there is a life that is the State’s duty to protect with similar possible options..
Perhaps it’s just an emotional old wives’ tale that he doesn’t know about, but I’m curious that he doesn’t include what must be one of the oldest tests of gestational development – the quickening, when the woman feels the fetus’ movements for the first time.
Things are rarely that simple.
Fine: for what it’s worth, that’s my view as well.
How could an issue which might be termed a “life/death” matter, not be emotional? A woman may have a particular view on abortion, until she’s faced with that decision.
Too many confident generalisations here, IMO. Women differ, partners differ, doctors differ, parliamentarians differ, life circumstances differ. This is complicated.
“Get yor rosaries off my ovaries!” is OK as far as it goes; the problem is that it doesn’t go anywhere near the distance that humane, thoughtful people require in thinking about abortion.
Vehemence and long campaigning doesn’t make someone a ‘nutter’. The Pope is entitled to his beliefs. But so am I. Therein lies one of the difficulties. Bring back Cardinal Sin of Manila – at least he had a sense of humour. He had to.
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Why? No-one said anything that could possibly have required that response. Pavlov’s cat said:
And you responded by saying
The only way in which your comments are consistent is if you believe that pointing out the fact that a foetus’s existence is dependent on a woman’s body is inappropriately emotional, irrespective of the tone in which that point is made.
This is a serious question. Do you believe that public policy regarding abortion would be more appropriately made if we completely disregarded the fact that, for a foetus to be turned into a baby, a woman has to carry it for 9 months and then either raise it for 18 years or give it up, and instead just conceptualised the foetus as a separate entity?
But surely persuasion of a sufficient number of people is required to ensure those changes? And legislation can be changed in both directions, depending on how much pressure is being applied, and by whom. I don’t know how old you are, Fine, but some of us *totters, leans on walking stick, adjusts spectacles* can remember a time when no matter how strongly we personally felt that it was done and dusted, the law had quite other views and we saw our friends’ lives being derailed as a result. That kind of memory doesn’t leave you, and the threat of its recurrence is real. Look how strong the push is in the US to repeal Roe v. Wade.
Helen, Paul, others:
I was trying to keep my own opinion out of this, but I feel letting people know where I stand may take some of the steam out of this. I would tend towards the 3rd option. With that reasonably clear, I would like to re-iterate that the I just feel that having either side vilify the other is not helping.
The “Pope” has a viewpoint on this which I respect as carefully considered and informed by his faith and his own personal moral viewpoint. The fact I disagree that this view should be reflected in secular criminal legislation does not mean that I respect his view any less.
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Zoe,
I could have listed many different points, from copulation to first breath and possibly to economic independence. It would have made my comment a little longer, though.
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rainne,
Personally, I would expect the woman concerned to make that decision. She (with the possible exception of her partner) is the only one in a position to have the information needed to do so. I also think that my points are consistent if you seperate the moral / religious arguments from the consideration of public policy.
Well under option (3) we would have the situation where one day before being born the fetus would have no rights and the next it would have full rights – no matter the impact on the mother having to raise it for 18 years or give it up. There would be no rights even if it were possible to for the fetus to be delivered live rather than killed first (and neither procedure is going to be risk free).
I think we’re capable of considering a balance of rights between the woman and the fetus which changes over the life of the pregnancy.
I understand what you mean PC and I realise that these rights are always under threat.
What I meant is that my understanding of the legislation in Victoria gives three options, none of which include winding back abortion rights. In this context, I’m not interested in this thread in having arguments about abortion rights. Plus, my experience is that people who are anti-choice simply aren’t open to persuasion.
Oh, OK, fair enough. And that last point is all too true.
Is that even possible? When anyone formulates laws or regulations, then moral considerations IMO inevitably come into play. Policy can be good or bad, and that entails a moral judgement, whatever one’s moral basis is (religious nutter, religious moderate, left, right, atheist utilitarian, whatever).
PC, I read my last comment and it sounded a bit blunt. Sorry, I was in a hurry on my way out.
Exactly.
Once again we are back to the ‘law is a blunt instrument’ issue.
I’m not sure about that, Fine. Option 1 looks like pretty much enshrining the Menhennit ruling into law. But a precedent and a law are not the same thing. It could be framed so that unless documentary proof can be offered of an entire organ in the wrong place or fulminating psychosis, doctors will still be prosecuted. At least that’s my suspicious view.
It all boils down to the same thing: the view that unless forcibly prevented, women will frivolously and thoughtlessly obtain abortions “as a matter of routine”. Any debate will be framed by the anti-choicers as pertaining to late abortions.
I just feel that having either side vilify the other is not helping.
The “Pope” has a viewpoint on this which I respect as carefully considered and informed by his faith and his own personal moral viewpoint. The fact I disagree that this view should be reflected in secular criminal legislation does not mean that I respect his view any less.
No, the difference is that the Pope and the church have actual, institutional power. This is not just a matter of agreeing to disagree.
I need to clarify some more: It’s not about bashing catholicism. To me, it’s about the fact that historically, there is a strong Catholic social conservative element in the Victorian Labor party. That is a fact. This has implications for how the vote will go and makes me fear that option 1, the option with most (albeit limited) scope for punishing women and their doctors, will be the one that gets up. I don’t see Catholics as worse than many Protestant religions but in that instance, they can affect womens’ lives in the real world.
Have you seen a pro-choicer change sides?
That decision seems like a good model for how not to go about reform. There are many purely legal reasons to dislike Roe v. Wade. It was an undemocratic ruling which had plainly nothing to do with the intent of the constitution, and still prevents changes to law by elected governments.
Leon, I was not advocating Roe v. Wade as such; I was merely pointing out how much violent resistance there is to it from anti-choice campaigners. My guess is that any resistance to it on the grounds that it may be bad law is a tiny fraction of the whole.
It has been reported in medical journals and videos have been shown in the past re abortions, and the baby feels pain. It is a living thing so to speak. Barbaric practice to say the least. But, who is to pass judgment. If a woman were raped, would an abortion be the right thing to do, it does seem she seeks medical attention afterwards and efforts are made to ensure she does not have a pregnancy from that rape. It is a very touchy subject, but late term abortions – sounds awful. pOOR BABY.
Late term abortions are nearly always performed during much-wanted pregnancies when severe medical conditions affect either the mother or the foetus.
Unwanted pregnancies which are terminated happen in the first trimester overwhelmingly, with far fewer late-discovered pregnancies terminated in the second trimester. By the time a pregnancy progresses to the third trimester, it’s nearly always a wanted pregnancy and to have a wanted pregnancy terminated is universally viewed as a tragedy.
Most of the debate around abortion refers to women who simply don’t want to be pregnant at that time. Discussing a class of abortion which is limited almost entirely to women who do actually very much want that pregnancy to continue if only it were medically advisable, that unnecessarily confuses the issue.
See how quickly someone skewed the discussion to late-term abortion?
VERY rare procedure, Margo, and never undertaken without a very good reason, as Tigtog points out. (The dwarfism case is always cited as proof women will be having late-term abortion parties if not stopped, but they’ve never been able to come up with another example, and that one had to go to a hospital ethics panel.)
And has ruined several people’s lives — harm done mainly because (as with the current Bill Henson fiasco) there has been such unrestrained public tutting and howling about what one single female person has chosen to do with her body and the press has picked it up to sell papers.
Click here to send an email to all Victorian MPs supporting option C.
“It has been reported in medical journals and videos have been shown in the past re abortions, and the baby feels pain.”
There is one video in particular that circulates in anti-abortion propaganda, and it is not at all self-evident what is being depicted. These ‘debates’ form yet another context where visual ‘evidence’ is framed in a certain way to produce certain effects.
Again!!
It’s not about late-term abortion!!
The same (extremely small) number of women will want a late term abortion as want one now.
Maybe minus a few, who haven’t been prevented from getting an early abortion by legal hurdles and anti-choicer static. And that is a good thing.
But this is really the rarest of the rare scenario, and that is why we need to stop framing the debate – to borrow your words Klaus – within it!
As I’m sure that Klaus, Helen and many others know, those claims that abortion causes pain to a foetus are misinformation when regarding the majority of abortions that take place before the full functional development of the neocortex in the foetal brain.
Even if the body is responding to noxious stimuli (part of the spinal reflexes mediated
inbelow the brainstem), a brain without a functioning neocortex cannot feel any sensation of pain. Before 20 weeks gestation the synapses in the brain have not even started to develop (and they first develop within the neocortex without connecting to the rest of the brain).The neocortex doesn’t start to make significant synaptic connections with the thalamus (which mediates sensory signals) until 24 weeks gestation. In those rare abortions that occur after this stage it’s common practice to kill the foetus by injection before the extraction begins, despite any propaganda to the contrary.
I sent off the email and have received a reply from Don Nardella, who’s the Labor MLA for Melton. He simply thanked me for the email.