More, Please: Down Under Edition
By It’s nice to see that some pro-choice advocates in Australia are following the Lamott model:
“I bring to this debate personal experience,” said Senator Nick Minchin, who opposed the legislation. “A former girlfriend of mine had an abortion,” he said Wednesday on the floor of Parliament. Mr. Minchin, 52, is also the country’s finance minister, from the conservative governing Liberal Party, but there is no suggestion that he will lose his post, or even his next election.
What was perhaps more stunningly personal was the statement on the Senate floor by Senator Lynette Allison, a sponsor of the legislation.
“An estimated one in three women have had an abortion,” she said. “And I am one of them.”
She was 18, and abortion was illegal then, in the 1960’s, she said in an interview. She came from a conservative family, “which would have been ashamed of their daughter having an illegitimate child,” added Ms. Allison, 59, who was a secondary school teacher before she got into politics. It was not difficult to make the public statement, and she did so out of solidarity with other women, she said.
“There are a lot of efforts to shame women who have had a termination,” Ms. Allison said. “It was important to send a message to women that they were not alone, that there were people who understood.”
Abortion here is regulated by the states, and it has generally been legal for 30 years.
“It is a decision for a woman and her doctor,” said Wendy McCarthy, a businesswoman who recently stepped down as chancellor of the University of Canberra and advocates abortion rights.
Good for them. And what have the effects of easily available, state-funded abortion, not always defended with abject shame, been?
In recent years, the number of abortions has been gradually declining, largely because of better sex education, not only in the schools, but also in magazines for women, and a greater availability of contraceptives, Ms. McCarthy said.
Of course.
Perhaps my favorite part of the Saletan/Pollit debate was her demolition of Saletan’s assumption that puritan sexual discourse would increase the use of contraception: “You want to intensify our culture’s already broad, deep strain of sexual Puritanism, shame and blame, and attach it to contraception. It won’t work, because contraception is really about other value–pleasure, health, self-expression, self-protection…that is why there is no movement of pro-Roe abortion-hating contraceptive enthusiasts, just waiting for Barbara Boxer to sound the trumpet.” As I’ve previously written, this kind of bootstrapping seems to be a favorite technique of a certain kind of “centrist” pro-choicer: you weld attractive policy proposals to moralistic finger-wagging, and pretend that the latter is somehow necessary to achieve the former although there’s no logical connection between the two. (And, of course, without the latter there’s nothing to argue about, because pro-choicers in fact already favor all of the policy proposals, and have been advocating them for many decades.) This might be harmless if the two strands of the argument were merely logically independent, but in fact the moralism generally tends to undercut support for the good policies. It’s simply not a coincidence that in countries where Puritan attitudes about sex are less prevalent in public discourse, contraception and rational sex education are more widely available (and, incidentally, abortion rates are lower despite being more easily and equitably available.) Talking about how immoral and irresponsible women who get abortions are will undermine support for abortion, but is also likely to undermine support for rational policies in other respects. (One of the “reasonable” regulations of abortion advocated by the “sensible center,” remember, is the defunding of reproductive clinics.) And, certainly, it’s overwhelmingly clear that you don’t need to attack women who get abortions in order to achieve sensible reproductive policy.
(Cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugged.)