An (un)informed Choice
The Canberra Times, May 26, 1997, Pg 16
It is time for pro-choice orthodoxy to be re-examined, writes Melinda Tankard Reist.
Melinda Tankard ReistTHE RIGHT to choose has so dominated the abortion discourse that no-one has looked at what it really means for women. The National Health and Medical Research Council’s "expert panel" report Termination of Pregnancy in Australia is no exception. Polemical, ideological it is a salute to choice.
Abortion as a social benefit, or, in the words of American feminist theologian Beverley Harrison who visited Canberra recently, a "positive moral good for women" remains unscrutinised. It is time for a re-examination of the pro-choice orthodoxy.
Abortion has come to be seen as just one more consumer good: a product or service that can be bought if desired. The rhetoric of choice suggests that women are free-willed individuals in control, having a range of options, all of equal merit, good quality and value for money.
The word choice reveals no desperation, no problems, no pain, no social or cultural conditions compelling the decision.
The women contributing to a book I am writing feel they were sold down the river by the rhetoric of choice- Their experience has so far been ignored in the politics of the right to choose. Exercising this right is more important than a woman’s actual lived experience of abortion. Women ;whose lives are shattered by that experience are ignored, cast aside as over-sensitive, psychologically unstable, victims of socially constructed guilt.
Many women are suffering emotionally from a procedure which was supposed to be emotionally’ benign. They are unable to comprehend why they were so ill-prepared for the psychological trauma they experienced, sometimes soon after, but often years after, the event.
Some women contributing to my book have been physically harmed in the procedure. A Sydney lawyer describes the experiences of some of the women seeking legal advice as assault and battery. A Melbourne woman delivered her baby at home in the toilet after her "safe, legal abortion".
The experience of women is trivialised. At a family-planning conference in Sydney recently, Dr Geoff Brodie of Australian Birth Control Services, relating the results of a Sydney trial of the anti-ulcerant drug. Misoprostol, for chemical abortion, quipped that one woman had even aborted at McDonald’s days after the drug’s administration. Many in the audience laughed.
The notion of informed consent for many women is a cruel myth. (The evidence of abortion as a risk factor in breast cancer and in suicide (British Medical Journal December) continue to be kept from women. A young Aboriginal woman died and a Chinese woman is lying in a nursing home after their abortions in Brisbane - we haven’t heard much about them either).
When women try to get counselling, they are told there is no such thing as post-abortion grief syndrome and to just pull themselves together and get on with their lives. One grief-stricken woman was told by a women’s health centre counsellor it was wrong of them to speak badly of her abortion experience - abortion was such hard-won right and she vas doing the cause harm. A former clinic staffer ;gives an account of how certain women judged unworthy of motherhood by he clinic, were propelled to a "yes" decision. The staffer was castigated for encouraging women who clearly did not want to proceed with :he abortion, to re-dress and leave the clinic.
Abortion has fostered a eugenic-inspired belief that only certain people should have babies, and only when the timing and circumstances are perfect. Babies made to order. No births should occur that would stretch our resources, or call upon our repressed communitarian obligations to care. Nothing to stir our collective conscience for the abandoned single woman who has defied the proper order of things by continuing a pregnancy she could have (should have) aborted.
Abortion has become an act of social obligation. The more it has become entrenched, the more difficult it has become for women to resist the pressure to avail themselves of it. The discourse around abortion of "unplanned", "unwanted" and "crisis pregnancy move women in a certain direction. The use of the term "therapeutic abortion" treats pregnancy as a disease which requires a medical/technical solution.
Abortion takes place in a culture of cosmetic surgery. It restores a woman’s slim and youthful figure to its pre-pre-pregnancy, socially desirable state; a uterine stapling to correct an out-of control body and prevent unnecessary weight gain.
Women who have an abortion often find themselves carrying out the prescribed role of pleasing others; maternal sacrifice for the greater good. They pay the price for the injustices on our political and economic system, their babies reduced to chattels to be disposed of Women are restructured while society stays the same.
Abortion has done nothing to remove the underlying circumstances behind women s problems. Their real needs remain unmet and the feminisation of poverty marches on. As Elizabeth Moore has pointed out, "Poverty itself negates the right to make free choices." Choice has become synonymous with abortion.
Medical literature is acknowledging the significance of perinatal loss, but the culture of abortionism denies women the right to grieve. One woman has said, "I didn’t expect such an emotional experience, especially the grief. I felt guilty and ashamed that I was so upset. We don’t talk about the grief and the angst. I felt betrayed that abortion was made to look like an easy decision, and it wasn’t for me." The pro-choice dogma prevents an objective scientific examination of its effects. The right to choose catch-cry is incomplete: what is being chosen is not defined. The empty ‘pregnancy sac' in figure 2.2 of the report attests to what Naomi Wolf describes as ‘the foetus as nothing paradigm’. The suffering of those who have come to feel abortion was for them not so much as an act of self-determination than of other-determination continues to be trivialised.
The choice ethos has spawned many other medical and social "advances".
Choice justifies genetic screening, termination of the disabled, "foetal reduction" to reduce a pregnancy to a more "manageable" size and sex selection abortions. The report has nothing to say on these matters. So committed are its authors to unfettered access to abortion, they even recommend the horrendous D&X, or partial-birth abortion method used by Dr David Grundmann in Queensland, on babies of six-months gestation. This method involves partially delivering the baby feet first with forceps, leaving the head in the birth canal, piercing the skull with scissors and suctioning the brain so the skull can be crushed and delivered. Dr Grundmann, described by the High Court last year as ‘in effect, a criminal", is thanked for his contribution to the report. The right to choose mantra has grown so loud as to silence questions. Its time they were heard.
Melinda Tankard Reist is a Canberra writer with a special interest in women’s health and biomedical issues. She advises Senator Brian Harradine on bioethical, refugee and human-rights issues.
PS: Melinda has just published a book on post-abortion grief. Details can be found at: http://members.xoom.com/abcon/stories/reist.htm