Lalitha Chelliah
The decision of ABC TV's Compass program to screen the British film on abortion, My Foetus, has prompted a renewed debate on abortion in Australia.
Health minister Tony Abbott encouraged the debate after prominent feminists Wendy McCarthy, Eva Cox and Catharine Lumby called for a "constructive discussion" about "late-term" abortions. Their call was based on apparent advances in technology, which enable premature babies to survive outside the womb.
While saying that they did not wish to "preempt the debate", in raising the question of whether a review of the "appropriateness" of abortion at different stages of pregnancy is needed, McCarthy, Cox and Lumby inevitably opened up the whole question of abortion rights to debate, an opening that Abbott, a devout anti-choice Catholic, has seized to advance his own reactionary ideas.
Technology has indeed advanced and millions of dollars are spent every year to keep prematurely born infants alive. This may be rightly so as some parents do request it. But one of the problems in this debate so far is that no-one has looked at the facts of keeping such infants alive. An infant born before 37 weeks of gestation is classified as premature. An infant born at 32 weeks is said to be very premature.
But the real problems arise when the gestation, combined with birth weight, are much lower. According to the June 2002 Archives of Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine, up to 20% of infants born under 30 weeks and weighing less than 1000 grams have major short- and long-term problems, including learning difficulties; a neurodevelopmental and/or neuropsychological disorder (40-50%); and 45% were in remedial classes and 20% had repeated classes.
According to a Department of Human Services fact sheet, very and extra low birth weight babies suffer serious diseases in the first weeks of life, including respiratory stress syndrome, bleeding in the brain, bacterial infections, and metabolic diseases such as hypoglycemia (low sugar) and jaundice. Most of these infants are unable to suck and swallow well beyond 32 weeks of gestation. Some infants born at 35-37 weeks of gestation can suffer slowness to suck and have to be tube-fed.
The fact sheet describes the mental and physical disabilities that also occur: developmental delay cerebral palsy (although there is some debate on this), hearing and visual impairment, and other manifestations of perinatal (immediately after birth) brain injury. About 30% suffer more subtle manifestations including learning difficulties and behavioural problems.
Other persistent illnesses include the chronic lung disease Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia. Infants with BPD may need oxygen therapy for months and are more likely to be readmitted to hospital for respiratory infections and have a high tendency of asthma and ear infection. The social and emotional effects of premature birth have not even been considered in the debate so far, yet the impact of such an infant on the mother and family is huge.
There are very real limitations to what new reproductive technologies have to offer, yet women are never told these facts when they decide what to do about their pregnancy.
Whose rights?
Underlying this debate about late-term abortion is the issue of whether or not a woman has the right to abort a foetus at any stage in her pregnancy. This debate is often presented in terms of "when life begins". For the religious right, epitomised in Abbott's views, life begins at the moment of conception, so terminating a pregnancy at any stage of pregnancy is murder and should be banned by the state.
Abbott and others' current questioning of the validity of late-term abortions is a cover, and the thin end of the wedge, for their opposition to women accessing abortion at all. The discussion cannot be isolated to just late-term abortion, as declared by Abbott, as for him this is the beginning of the deliberate eroding of abortion rights as a whole. He wishes to maintain the patriarchal stranglehold. The reality is that this debate is about the fundamental human rights of women.
Unable to convince women to always sacrifice their own right to health and well-being to the survival of an unborn, unconscious foetus, the right-wing uses emotional and moral blackmail. Their advance that abortion is murder is nothing more than a religious argument backed up, not by scientific fact or logic, but merely by "God's word".
Yet, while these opponents of abortion argue their position as a God-given, universal, moral imperative, religious groups are by no means united on the issue. The ABC's decision to show My Foetus in a religious program cannot be allowed to go unnoticed. This collusion with the right-wing in presenting abortion as a religious concern is unacceptable behaviour for a publicly owned television station.
Today most of the world's religions recognise and acknowledge the rights of women to choose abortion. Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and almost all branches of Protestantism give women this right under certain circumstances. In India abortion is legal at a national level. The Koran supports the right to abortion in early pregnancy, although most Islamic countries forbid abortion. Only the most patriarchal religions, including Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, continue to prohibit abortion under any circumstances, even to save a woman's life.
Furthermore, even within the Catholic and other churches, the doctrine on abortion has changed radically and frequently from the 1st century BC to today. The embryo or foetus is presented as something separate from the woman — a human being with "rights" equal to those of the mother (indeed in some cases beyond those of the mother). This is an effort to deny the reality that the relationship between the woman and her foetus is a symbiosis, one which is entirely dependent on the state of health and the will of the woman. The foetus exists as an entity only for so long as the woman chooses to continue that relationship.
Myths and facts
The abortion issue is surrounded by myths generated to play on existing prejudices and fears. Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital provides support, clinical and surgical services to women with unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. According to Annarella Hartman, manager of the Pregnancy Advisory Service there, the commonly held belief that the vast majority of women with unplanned pregnancies are young is not supported by the data in her service. She adds that the idea that abortion is used as a form of contraception is also false. The rigorous routines in hospitals, and the tests and examinations that a women has to go through are hardly attractive as an alternative to contraception.
Some of the multitude of reasons for unplanned or unwanted pregnancies, says Hartman, are failure of contraception, inaccurate knowledge, conflicting/confusing information from health professionals, lack of or limited knowledge, poor access to information and geographical reasons, assault and coercion, and financial reasons like a lack of bulk billing GPs and/or not being able to afford contraception.
The fact that a First World country like Australia is unable to provide adequate education and services to help women avoid abortion, a medical procedure that all women would prefer not to have to undergo, says a lot about our society. Abbott paints women who have an abortion as villains and murderers, yet his government's social and economic policies have forced many women into situations where they have no choice but to terminate their pregnancies.
The other issue that is missing in this debate is information on the fate of babies that are born but not wanted. While there is no data specifically connecting child abuse to unwanted pregnancies, anecdotal evidence demonstrates that not being wanted and loved has a huge impact on a child, as well as the parent.
Mother-baby interaction is recognised as crucial for bonding and long-term relationship building in the child's future life. The first 18 months are considered crucial in this process, but how can a woman bond with a baby if she never wanted it in the first place? Until these sorts of real, long-term social issues are included in this debate it will remain distorted and dishonest.
Framing the debate in terms of images of the procedure (as the film My Foetus does), advances in technology and premature birth survival (as McCarthy, Cox and Lumby do), or religious "morality" (as Abbott does) is not merely unbalanced— it poses a real and immediate danger to every woman's right to a decent quality of life. This is because in the end the issue of abortion is often a social question: a question of human — specifically women's — rights.
The challenge for all those who support women's rights, including their fundamental right to control what happens to their own bodies, is to transform gender relations and the way sexual and reproductive relations are perceived in society. That includes struggling against enslavement by new reproductive technologies and the medical and pharmaceutical industry, and towards democratic control of these.
Ultimately, the challenge we face is to transform the overall priorities of society so that health, education and welfare services, employment opportunities and everything else that is necessary for women to take real control of their bodies are available and accessible.
But even if we did have a perfect health and education system, the fact remains that contraception will still fail sometimes. It is for this reason that even in countries where contraceptive education and services are widely available, abortion services remain necessary. The choice to terminate a pregnancy must be recognised and respected for what it is — an entirely personal one. For that reason, neither the church nor the state should have any role and all laws relating to abortion should be repealed.
[Lalitha Chelliah works as a community nurse in Melbourne and is a national co-convenor of the Socialist Alliance and.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, August 18, 2004.
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