IMPORTANT
NEWS:
The Senate Community
Affairs Committee is
inviting written submissions relating to the Bill which would legalise the abortion pill RU486 in Australia.
Submissions from people
from all walks of life should be lodged by Monday, 16 January 2006.
The Committee prefers to receive submissions electronically as an attached document - email: community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au
– otherwise by fax: 02 6277 5829.
The Plan:
1.
Get
some background by reading Christina’s article on RU486.
2.
Use the Cut, Paste & Lobby option. At the end of
the article is brief example of an email to an MP. Copy it, then click on the link and email your MPs.
3. Write a quick submission to the Senate Community Affairs Committee (address
above).
If you just do any one of these steps, it will help (slacker!).
DIY abortions…RU concerned?
Question: are backyard abortions good for women if the pro-choice
lobby tells us they are?
Imagine this: women dying of peritonitis, infections and massive haemorrhaging as well as septic shock (because
of foetal remains in the uterus) after a botched termination. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what so many
have dreaded happening should abortion access become restricted or even banned.
Except the culprit in those deaths
is not a nameless, shifty character in a back-alley. It’s a pill.
And our members of Parliament (with a
few exceptions) are doing all they can to make it available to us.
Right now, the government is being pressured by
lobby groups and a cross-section of MPs to lift Australia’s strict limits on the abortion drug RU-486. PM Howard
has given permission for a Coalition conscience vote on it early this year.
RU-486 (also called Mifepristone or Mifeprex)
is being hailed as “a safe and welcome alternative to surgical termination” (Liberal MP Sharman Stone in The Australian newspaper 14/11/05).
Cleverly so –
a lot of women would prefer the idea of popping a pill to subjecting themselves to a surgical abortion. After all, options
are good, aren’t they?
Meanwhile, others, such as Health Minister Tony Abbott and Coalition Senator Alan Eggleston,
are less eager to welcome RU-486 to your local corner pharmacy. Eggleston, who practised as a GP and obstetrician for
20 years in WA, told The Australian, “The main problem…is that it may result in an incomplete miscarriage, leaving the woman
in danger of potentially life-threatening haemorrhage and infection and, of course, it is impossible to predict which patients
this will happen to.”
What
no one seems to have noticed is a shocking about-face on the part of the pro-choice lobby.
Anyone who has debated abortion access or
attended a rally on this subject knows that it isn’t long before someone comes out with a variation on: “Backyard
abortions – is that what you want for women?”
In fact, pro-lifers have never wanted backyard abortions. But does the recent turn of events show us that backyard
abortion is exactly what the pro-choice lobbyists have wanted all along?
Chief Medical Officer John Hovarth found that “a medical abortion…is
unsafe in circumstances in which appropriate supervision and follow-up may not be available” (The
Australian, 16/11/05). So can someone explain to me why this drug is being talked
up as a godsend for “rural women who do not have the same access to abortion clinics as women living in metropolitan
areas” (Sharman Stone in The Australian, 14/11/05)?
Maybe it is because the image of a hard-working, drought-stricken “rural woman”
with too many mouths to feed and not enough options makes the rest of us feel guilty. Take it from me (and I happen
to be a “rural woman”) – bleeding
to death in the bush is one option we don’t need.
The fact is women taking RU-486 need expert care, yet even when this care is appropriately administered,
women are dying.
What is it about backyard abortion that casts a pall over every abortion debate? It is the potential
for loss of mothers’ lives, from a lethal lack of supervision, credentials and accountability. RU-486 is guilty on all counts.
Every cause of death I mentioned in that grim opening paragraph is a documented instance
of a fatality caused by RU-486 in countries where the drug is legally available. And those are just the documented deaths.
(Where is the Left’s suspicion of sinister Big Pharma when you need it?)
I abhor induced abortion. But
I am equally appalled by the tragedy of the young woman who took RU-486 and bled for eight days until she simply died.
That was a 16-year-old Swedish girl, who in 2003 went home after a hospital advised her that it would be normal for
her to bleed for up to two weeks (see Christopher Pearson’s column, “Risky Drug of Pro-Choice” in The Weekend Australian 12-13/11/05).
There are few instances in which people who consider themselves “pro-choice”
or “pro-life” have the potential to find themselves on the same side of the ring, but please hear me out and unite
if you dare:
If you are pro-woman, don’t give us Do-It-Yourself abortion.
Keep RU-486 banned.
Christina Sonnemann
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Cut, Paste and Lobby
Dear [Member of Parliament],
RU486 is a dangerous drug
that has no place in Australia.
Please tell me how you will vote on this issue, as my friends, family, church members and colleagues
are all very concerned about it.
Thank you for your time,
[YOU]
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For contact addresses of MPs go to our Politics page.
Click pic to download Black and White, 5.5 x 4.25 inches in size
300 dpi suitable for printing
|
click pic to download small 4"x6" version. For poster
size visit Feminists for Life
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amazing,
hard-hitting
positive
pro-life fliers/posters.
Choose one or several from their site,
download them,
put them up at school,
work
or anywhere.
Gags Off
Christina's blog, Thursday, February 3, 2005
What woman wants to hear what men have to say about
abortion? Me!
When
a male dares to publicly voice concern over abortion, he is usually stung to silence by rhetoric carefully chosen to destroy
any thoughtful conversation (e.g. “I’ll listen to you after you grow a uterus!”).
I will admit to
my own form of bias: if you have never been in utero, I don’t care what you have to say about abortion.
I was
born in 1981. Many of my friends and I had no protection under law until we took our first gasp of air. We all,
boys and girls alike, depended on our mothers’ courage and goodwill alone to survive until that gasp.
Yet while
my girl friends’ opinions on this issue are barely tolerated in Western society on good days, similar opinions held
by my guy friends’ rate in importance somewhere below those of a maggot. The argument is that a man is simply
not qualified to even form an opinion on abortion.
Why not qualified? It can’t be because males are not
impacted by abortion. Males are aborted every day (admittedly in smaller numbers than females, but that’s another
story). There are countless other ways in which abortion impacts people, but that is obviously not the criterion which
is being insisted upon.
No, the fact that stands in the way of their contribution to the debate is that men cannot
choose to have an abortion performed on their own bodies (though they frequently choose abortions for their partners).
May
I present to you an imperfect but provocative metaphor?
Until very recently, women did not go to war – in the
sense of being armed by their governments to combat enemy troops on the battlefield.
This did not stop women from voicing
opinions on war, opinions that displayed the diversity of women’s minds. Were they unqualified to even hold these
opinions, much less express them?
Imagine: your farm is burning, the food is gone and you may end up as part of the
enemy’s loot, but you wouldn’t dream of commenting on any of this – you’re not qualified. Unlikely!
Certainly a woman in her house could not comment on WWI from the same angle as a man in his trench. If honest,
she would not claim that she could. But her opinion just might add something of meaning to the general debate.
Men’s
arguments for or against abortion should be assessed on the basis of their consistency, attention to the facts, etc...in short,
all the various good qualities that make any opinion worth having.
This outright gagging of the opposition impoverishes
the debate and makes the playing field woefully skewed. Skewed, because the over-represented voice of the pro-abortion
male is welcomed and honoured by abortion advocates – in the very teeth of their own exclusionist logic.
Christina Sonnemann
Just before
Christmas in 2001, the reality of abortion broke into my heart.
Sherrin's blog,
Tuesday, 9 Nov 2004
I went to Tasmania’s Parliament
House to pray while a Bill to change the abortion law was debated. I sat in the gallery, listened to the politicians, and
prayed. I was there for hours. I witnessed parts of both the pro-choice and the pro-life protests outside.
When I think of that day, it still
chills me. It was a summer day, warm and bright. The pro-life protest was a small line of people just outside the door of
Parliament House. They stood silently, some holding placards of slogans or fetuses. The pro-choice protest was held later
on the lawn of the Parliament House gardens. Speakers stood on the broad stone steps. Behind them were the historic sandstone
parliament house buildings. In front were the ancient oaks and Hobart’s famous waterfront. Many professional looking
and smartly dressed women stood on the smooth grass. They cheered together for speakers who said abortion was just a women’s
health issue, entirely up to a woman and her doctor, needed to prevent backyard jobs, something that politicians should not
have any role in. “Who has any right to tell a woman what to do?”
A pro-life friend watched the protest
whilst sitting on the grass under the oaks. She told me that the protesters cheered over one woman’s abortion story.
This woman had a child, then two abortions, and then another child. The sound of women cheering over abortion horrified me.
It is one thing to believe abortion should be a choice available for women in difficult circumstances. It is another to cheer
about it.
When I look back on that day, I see
it as a milestone in my life. To use a clichéd phrase, it changed my life. Like the day five years ago my best friend lost
control of the car we were travelling in and we drove into a rock face at 80km an hour. I had a crush fracture to a vertebra
in my low back and have had chronic pain ever since. Like the day I decided to be a Christian. When the words “God loves
you” became real to me after I had heard them all my life. What I saw on the day I visited the Tasmanian Parliament
for the first time left me compelled to become involved in pro-life work. My day at Parliament left me with memories of even
the smallest details. The mauve trousers I was wearing with the coloured beads along the cuffs. The sinking feeling I had
when I realised that the pro-choice protesters were wearing mauve and purple.
For months afterwards I wept for the thousands of dead babies that have been killed in our land. I had nightmares about
them bloody, dead and broken. I desperately tried to forget but I could not. I grieved for the loss of the potential of those
children. Have we aborted someone who would have made great contributions to assisting the hungry or the downtrodden of the
world? Have we killed a great man who would have become the Prime Minister of Australia?
This grief was a terribly lonely experience. In Hobart, the capital city of the state of Tasmania, I knew no one else
sho felt this way. Many church people would express their disapproval of abortion. Others seemed less convinced. No one I
knew seemed to feel the horror and grief of abortion. I desperately wished I had
never gone to Parliament House that day. That I didn’t know the reality of what was happening. I questioned whether
my feelings came form God or the devil. I could not understand why God had afflicted me with this grief, when no one else
seemed to feel it at all. I felt like there must be something wrong with me. I knew women who had abortions often suffered
from grief, but why was this happening to me? I had never had an abortion.
Over the years my grief has eased. What once shocked me is no longer even surprising. Sometimes I feel almost numb
and resigned to the reality of dead babies and the hard heartedness of abortion advocates. At other times the hurt comes sharply
again. The focus of my grief has also changed. Now I grieve more for the women who go through abortion. Their stories inhabit
my heart and bring tears to my eyes, even as I write this. I have come to understand that for many women abortion is not a
decision of convenience, but of desperation and despair. I grieve more for them not because their loss is greater than that
of the babies – but because the live to endure their loss. The babies lose their lives. The women’s lives are
never the same again. As Melinda Tankard Reist wrote in an article for an Australian newspaper: “Of course a baby is
for life, but so is an abortion.” If I once grieved over the deaths of babies with a heart-wrenching trauma that seemed
like it would never go away, how much more crushing is the grief of these women? My grief was for thousands – theirs
is often for just one. Yet how much greater their grief would be.
I still do not fully understand why God chose to
impress me so vividly with the horror of abortion. I question his purpose for me in this. Often the idea of doing anything
about abortion seems too hard and complex. I get sick of thinking about it. I get discouraged. Life would be easier if I could
suppress, ignore or underestimate the horror of abortion. Yet I now know that the Lord has called me. He does not want me
to ignore abortion. He would not let me forget.
Sherrin Ward
copyright 2004
Sherrin now has her own page.
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