Restrictions on the importation of abortion drug RU486 in Australia have suffered a quiet defeat, with Marie Stopes Clinic being granted a right to import the drug, which has not been widely available here. It was only in 2006 that the ministerial veto over prescription of this drug was lifted.
The right-to-life (or anti-choice) campaign is likely to be savage in its response, as anything that makes abortion 'easier' or safer removes the unduly punitive nature of surgical abortion as the only way out of an unwanted pregnancy. Because of course, women apparently make the complex ethical decision to have, or not have, an abortion based largely on their squeamishness about invasive procedures. Ladies, good news - we can go slutting it about and mercilessly slaughtering fresh generations of the unborn as we pop RU486 like contraception candy! Now we don't have to fear the clotheshanger or the surgical vacuum, there's no reason to continue being rational adult human beings doing their best to take adequate sexual health precautions!
If the above sounds like an absurd parody of how real people might actually behave, it's meant to. In the coming weeks, as the pro-life campaign gets under way, watch the language and materials being used. If past materials are any indicator, where the person seeking the abortion is referenced at all (and often they are not, with the focus squarely on the potential baby) it is often implicitly as someone thoughtless, selfish, irresponsible - or as an infantile, morally underdeveloped creature in need of paternalistic guidance. Seldom does it refer to women as complex human beings capable of rational and ethical determination, deserving of agency in their own right. It follows that people prepared to reduce women as a class to such diminuitive and powerless stereotypes are probably not the people that women who do not recognise themselves in these stereotypes would like to have controlling discussions on their health.
Those who wish to prevent someone else having the opportunity of informed choice in terms of continuing or terminating a pregnancy really ought to have no say in how easy or difficult the procedure is medically. This seems equivalent to handing control of the blood bank to Jehovah's Witnesses. If someone has a strong moral view that suggests that they will never, ever have need for a particular medical procedure, they should have no say at all on what form that procedure should take for other people. Government having recognised the exigency of allowing women some say over their own bodies have gradually eroded the criminal sanctions which have applied to abortion procedures in years past. These changes have largely happened in our lifetimes. Given that termination of pregnancy is a recognised medical need, the only views that should matter are those of medical experts and medical best practice. Incidentally, the World Health Organisation recognises RU486 as an essential medicine.
Despite massive leaps forward in recent times, the state of the law regarding abortion is still reflective of a past era. It is only in the ACT that medical abortion is straightforwardly legal. In Queensland and New South Wales it still exists in the Criminal Code as an offence for both doctors and patients. Since 2008, Victoria has decriminalised abortion if performed by a medical practitioner within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. In South Australia, and the Northern Territory while access in practice to a safe abortion is relatively unproblematic, the patient must still pass a relatively arbitrary 'maternal health/fetal disability' ground, as though pregnancy itself was not life and health-threatening. In Tasmania, it's lawful to have an abortion only if two doctors agree there is a health risk continuing with the pregnancy, and counselling is compulsory. In practice, the lack of availability of chemical means of procuring an abortion has led to many women having to endure invasive surgical procedures, on top of what is likely to already be an emotionally and psychologically difficult situation.
Those in this debate who believe that women should be compelled to carry to term every child ever conceived talk of 'a right to life'. They stand, valiant soldiers in the battle to ensure that the foetus who is likely to be born to a mother who lacks the capacity to care for that child, or who is the product of rape or failed contraception has a right to be born, a right to exist. They are curiously silent when it comes to that child's right to proper care, right to a home, right to affection, right to the care and protection of a parent who is capable of providing both. In 2010 to 2011, there were nearly 12,000 children known to the government put into formal out of home care because they lacked a parent able to care for them. In 2011, there were a total of 37,648 children aged 0 <17 living in out of home care arrangements nationally. Many of these children will grow up to become adults who have the state involved in removing their own children. They in many cases do not have the stability in their lives to form the attachments to a carer that are so critical in future relationships and development.
Every child should have a right to be loved, wanted, cared for, to feel secure, to have a stable and safe environment to grow up in. Not every woman who becomes pregnant is in a position to provide this, and we can see that despite the best efforts of government, a state-provided alternative does not guarantee it either. These rights could reasonably be considered as more meaningful than a right to be born which is, in practical terms, a right to be enforced against pregnant women.
This argument however is not on whether abortion is the best choice for all women, or for women in difficult life situations, or even that it is an easy one. Of course it is not. It is however clear that it should be a matter to be determined by the woman whose body it is. Given that, there can be no ethical right or reason to restrict access to the medical best practice option for terminating unwanted pregnancies. Denying women who seek an abortion access to the safest option to do so can be nothing but the product of a perverse desire to punish women seeking an abortion, and to use the woman's health as an ideological battlefield with the end goal being to revoke any choice at all. This strongly suggests a value for the 'life' of a cluster of cells which only have the potential to become a human being over the life of a realised adult human being, capable of thought, expression, and the possession of rights. Just as we don't give vegetarians a determinative say in the running of the livestock industry, we must be wary of those who would regulate away the safest way of terminating an unwanted pregnancy when their end goal is the the total removal of safe and legal access to abortion entirely.
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