By Rose McCann
The July 1 United States Supreme Court ruling on abortion has "blown a hole through Roe vs Wade big enough to drive a truck through", according to US feminist Gloria Steinem. She described the decision as "devious": while it did not completely overturn the 1973 ruling which legalised abortion, as many had feared it would, "there is no longer a basic right for women to choose abortion. It is now a privilege, hedged with restrictions, to be granted by the states."
Medical progress has given abortion a technological sophistication which makes it a comparatively straightforward and safe procedure. But because it is not considered a right in most parts of the world, it remains difficult to obtain for many.
While more women than ever before have access to abortion through public health systems or private clinics (at least in most advanced countries), abortion remains a vexed issue and is even at the forefront of politics in many parts of the world. In nearly all cases, political and religious conservative forces are the most vocal and organised opponents of abortion rights.
"Abortion: an international perspective" was the theme of a Politics in the Pub forum in Sydney (shortly before the US ruling) featuring Margaret McDonald from the Women's Electoral Lobby and the Family Planning Association and Pam Simons, chair of the Abortion Rights Coalition. Most of the following information is from their presentations.
Several months ago occurred what many consider to be the largest demonstration ever to take place in the US capital, when three-quarters of a million people who rallied in Washington to protest against moves by state and federal legislatures to restrict access to abortion.
Since 1989, when the Supreme Court ruled that state legislatures have the right to regulate access to abortion, virtually every state in the US has voted on anti-abortion bills, said McDonald.
While many state bills have been defeated or vetoed, two states in particular, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, passed laws making abortion more difficult to obtain.
The Louisiana law was the most restrictive. It would appear to have been made invalid by the July 1 Supreme Court decision, although that ruling was specifically on the Pennsylvania act. The Louisiana law prohibited all abortions except those performed within the first trimester to save the mother's life, or in very limited situations of rape or incest.
The court upheld provisions of the Pennsylvania law which compel women to be counselled by a doctor and to wait 24 hours before undergoing the operation, and which require women under 18 to obtain the approval of their parents or a judge. However, it did strike out a requirement for women to notify their husbands.
Gloria Steinem said there were 14 states "that have been just waiting to eliminate abortion [and] will now put maximum restrictions on it". While the maximum restrictions are not as great as these legislatures might have wished, the ruling legitimises many that have already been enacted and encourages their spread to other states. There are at present only 10 states in which abortion is unrestricted.
A Reproductive Freedom Bill currently being debated by Congress, if passed, would restore the unrestricted right to abortion. Steinem said, "I'm pretty sure we have enough votes [in Congress] to support that bill, but Bush has said that he will use his presidential powers to veto it. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton says he supports the bill. Ross Perot has said he is pro-
choice with some conditions, and that he "supports the laws of the land as interpreted by the Supreme Court".
The US, McDonald noted, has experienced the most vociferous opposition to abortion by conservative moralists. Tactics of the moral right have included arson, bombing, and vandalising of clinics and direct personal harassment of women seeking abortions.
The attacks on abortion rights in the US have spread to include attacks on access to contraception generally. In the last five years, funding for research programs to develop new contraceptives has fallen by over 50% in
real terms. Because many of the new methods are considered to be abortifacients by anti-abortionists, they have been subject to particular attack; research into many of them has often been curtailed or cancelled altogether.
Sex education has been another target of the right. Any attempts to introduce comprehensive sex education into schools are strongly resisted. Meanwhile, the adolescent pregnancy rate is soaring; the US has the highest rate of all advanced countries.
McDonald also spoke about the situation in a number of European countries. In most of the former socialist states, there now exists a "new conservatism" most loudly supported, she said, by the Catholic Church. Liberal abortion legislation is said to be a relic of an outmoded system of "communist social engineering" and something which has undermined "traditional family values".
In Bulgaria, very high inflation has made contraception a luxury item, though abortion continues to be available at low cost for most women who need it. In the Czechoslovakia there are proposals for substantial increases in the price of previously free abortions. In the Czech lands the cost of an abortion other than for medical reasons has already risen, while contraceptives on prescription continue to be available free of charge. In Hungary the constitutional court is expected to decide shortly on the legality of existing abortion legislation.
The situation for women in the former German Democratic Republic has worsened. Subsidies for contraceptives, creches and kindergartens have been withdrawn or curtailed. The question of how to integrate the liberal abortion laws of East Germany with the more restrictive West German statutes was left unresolved at the time of reunification; at the end of June, the Bundestag legalised abortion during the first three months of pregnancy, provided counselling is obtained from a doctor.
In the Soviet Union, "Abortion was never a matter of choice", McDonald said, "but rather a pressing necessity created by the lack of an alternative". Women in the former Soviet states had, on average, six abortions each during their reproductive years. Official figures show that existing contraceptive supplies in 1989 met only 30% of demand. Oral contraceptives were never produced in the Soviet Union. IUDs are
manufactured in small quantities and are said to be of very poor quality — as are domestically produced condoms, which are publicly derided as "galoshes".
In Poland there is continuing strong pressure to reverse the liberal abortion legislation. In May 1990, new regulations were imposed requiring a woman requesting an abortion to obtain written approval from three doctors and a psychologist, selected from a state-approved list. A Catholic Church-backed, almost total, ban on abortion was approved by the upper house of parliament in September 1990 but blocked by the lower house in May 1991. This has still not been resolved.
In January 1991, Poland eliminated state subsidies for modern contraceptives. Subsequently, the price of imported pills tripled. The restrictive regulations for obtaining state-funded abortion and the newly confirmed right of medical staff to refuse to perform abortions have resulted in a significant decline in terminations in public hospitals.
The anti-abortion campaign in Poland reportedly includes public denunciations at Sunday mass of women who are known to have had abortions, the picketing of pharmacies selling contraceptives, and priests refusing to hear confessions, give absolutions or marry anyone who has not signed an anti-abortion petition. The cost of obtaining a safe abortion privately is now said to be more than one month's average wage for a factory worker.
When addressing a group of visiting Polish politicians in the Vatican after the September 1990 Polish upper house vote, the pope said that Poland's "moral standing" depended on revoking the 1956 abortion law, which he described as "the last bastion of communist totalitarianism".
Branded by the Catholic Church as a communist organisation, the Polish affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Association had its subsidy reduced by the government, resulting in the closure of nearly half its branches. Despite the church's strong position, however, a February 1991 national survey by the Polish Centre for Public Opinion Studies showed that 58% of respondents were opposed to restricting access to abortion.
Pam Simons spoke on the situation in Australia. Every state here has different legislation. In South Australia, the 1968 legislation specifies that abortion is legal in prescribed hospitals on the recommendation of two doctors. Women in SA have found the system very cumbersome. The lack of doctors and nursing staff prepared to do terminations even in the prescribed hospitals has meant that there is a higher rate of second trimester abortions, resulting in a higher rate of medical complications.
The Northern Territory has the same legislation as SA with the proviso that abortion has to be carried out by an obstetrician or gynaecologist. As there are only one or two of these in the NT, abortions are hard to get.
Similar legislation was enacted in the ACT in 1978 and repealed only a few weeks ago. This clears the way for a free-standing abortion clinic. However, since it is feared that anti-abortionists would target such a clinic, feminists are starting to think about providing abortion through Family Planning clinics.
All other states have legislation which says abortion can take place to "save the life of the woman", though just what that means isn't clear, since legislation is interpreted by the courts. For example, Judge Levine ruled in NSW in 1971 that if a pregnancy was going to be damaging to a woman's emotional, physical or mental health or for social or economic reasons, then she could have an abortion. The economic criterion doesn't apply in any other state.
Victoria has the Menhennit ruling of 1968, which, because it doesn't refer to the economic reason, is a little more restrictive legally than NSW, though in practice it isn't more restrictive, at the moment. The equivalent of the Menhennit ruling applies in Queensland as the result of a court case following 1986 raids on abortion clinics.
The laws on abortion have not been tested in Western Australia or Tasmania. There have been no progressive pro-abortion doctors to fight a case in the courts, and the judges are unknown quantities. Most doctors don't want to raise the issue for fear of ruining their careers.
Women in Tasmania have to go to Victoria for abortions because hospitals in
Tasmania stopped carrying out the procedure four years ago. A small feminist-run abortion clinic was set up in Hobart a few months ago.
There are real problems in Western Australia, where an anti-abortionist, Keith Wilson, is minister for health and appears on anti-abortion platforms. The state ALP has had a policy of repealing abortion laws for years, but decided in 1991 not to do it.
The ALP policy committee did, however, move an amendment to the health policy that called for an improvement in abortion services. Wilson has since said that that can't be done because abortion is illegal in WA. A law professor, Richard Harding, has challenged this. Harding bases his argument on the existence in the legislation of the word "unlawful", indicating that some abortions are lawful.
Uncertainty about the law in WA has meant that abortions are carried out in a semi-clandestine manner. Government agencies are reluctant to provide information about abortion because they fear they might be breaking the law, and there are stories of threats to funding for non- government organisations if they provide information about abortion. So women in WA have to search furtively for information, and what information they get is often wrong.
In NSW, Fred Nile's bill, which would have limited abortion to some public hospitals, was resoundingly defeated last year. It would have meant that tens of thousands of women wouldn't have been able to get an abortion because hospitals wouldn't have been able to meet the demand. An estimated 35,000-40,000 abortions are carried out in the state each year, and 93% of them are carried out in centres other than hospitals.
Nile's new Unborn Child Protection Bill is now at the bottom of the list and probably won't come to a vote in the life of this parliament.
Nile's bills and the recent Irish case have led to a dramatic change in community attitude on this question. People are more and more realising that women become pregnant many times when they don't want to and very often they have no real control over the situation, yet they are expected to deal with the consequences. The community is coming more and more behind the pro-choice position.