Main image credit: American Life League
Senator Barnardi has recently made controversial comments about abortion, claiming it is an ‘abhorrent form of birth control.’
Well, he isn’t wrong. It is a way for women to control what they do and do not give birth to – and it’s a control women absolutely deserve. I’m a woman myself, and – forgive me for being crude – I greatly enjoy being able to control what goes in and out of my body.
And this is the question that bothers me most of all: why do some men think they have the right to restrict the control women have over their own bodies? Surely it’s no different from white people restricting where black people are allowed to sit on a bus: it’s a form of subjugation, the exercise of arbitrary dominion over others.
Julia Gillard was widely criticised for her ‘misogyny speech’, where she said, “We don’t want to live in an Australia where abortion again becomes the political plaything of men who think they know better.”
Image credit: Commonwealth Secretariat
While I don’t necessarily approve of the tactic of veering away from big policy issues, I can see the rationale behind bringing this issue up in a speech on front of women. Abortion is an issue that concerns women, and only women. Why should men dictate what we can and can’t do with our bodies? A valid point, in my opinion, even if it was a little off-topic. Gillard wanted to unite women under the promise that she, a woman, would be legislating on behalf of other women.
For further evidence that some men don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to abortion, one need turn no further than Tony Abbott. In 2004, he said abortion was the ‘easy way out’ for pregnant women, and in 2006 he said the following:
“We have a bizarre double standard…in this country where someone who kills a pregnant woman’s baby is guilty of murder but a woman who aborts an unborn baby is simply exercising choice.’
Image credit: DonkeyHotey
Firstly, I don’t think the choice to abort is ever easy. There are a thousand reasons a woman might seek an abortion – and a thousand reasons she might deserve one – but it’s never going to be ‘easy’. It’s going to be the lesser of two evils, or something necessary, or something heart-breaking even though it’s the right thing for that woman to do. Making abortion available does not make it ‘easy’. It’s just providing a woman with the options she is entitled to.
Secondly, Abbott was wrong. If you ‘kill’ a pregnant woman’s baby, you are not guilty of murder. That was a lie, pure and simple. The loss of a pregnancy is characterised as an injury to the mother, because the foetus in utero does not have ‘legal personhood.’
This is the issue raised by ‘Zoe’s law’, which seeks to define a foetus over 20 weeks or weighing more than 400 grams as a legal ‘person’. Thus, the loss of Brodie Donegan’s 36-week pregnancy (a girl to be called Zoe) in a car accident becomes an issue of loss of life, not merely injury.
The problem is that this leads down the road towards equating abortion with murder. Instead of making it an matter of loss of life, perhaps it should be an issue of violation. Just like rape, forced abortion or the withholding of abortion, it violates a woman’s right to control her own body. Otherwise we run into issues relating to the criminalisation of abortion, and these issues are being raised by women.
NSW Labor MP Helen Westwood said she is ‘absolutely committed to women determining their reproductive rights’, saying she has ‘real concerns’ about the bill. Labor MP Carmel Tebbutt said that unless the bill was amended, she wouldn’t support it: ‘I would not support legislation that may increase the risk of criminal prosecution for pregnancy termination.’ Labor MP Sophie Cotsis said ‘this bill could have unintended consequences for the ability of NSW women to safely and legally exercise their reproductive rights.’
Image credit: Kit4na
The bill was passed in NSW Parliament lower house in November 2013, and ministers who voted against it included Health Minister Jilian Skinner, Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian, Environment Minister Robyn Parker and the Minister for Women, Pru Goward. The bill will be seen by the upper house this year.
Abortion is a matter that concerns women, and women, perhaps unsurprisingly, are voting for their right to control what happens to their own bodies. We are the ones that legislation would affect; we are the ones who know what we want and what we need. Isn’t it time that men like Barnardi and Abbott started listening to us?
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