Teresa Foard, Melbourne
"It is only when women have safe, affordable and accessible reproductive health care that abortion rates go down", said Dr Susie Allanson, clinical psychologist at the Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic.
Allanson was recently invited to write on reproductive health and mental illness for the World Health Organisation. She told a March 8 International Women's Day forum on reproductive rights that women living in countries where terminations are not legal face appalling circumstances that affect not only their physical but their mental health.
The public meeting, attended by 150 people, was called by the Pro-Choice Coalition. The coalition was formed in November 2003 in response to a series of attacks on women's reproductive rights launched by federal health minister Tony Abbott and the religious right. According to PCC convenor Cobina Crawford, their "conservatism by stealth" agenda aims to stop the ability and right of Australian women to obtain safe, affordable and accessible terminations.
Allanson advocated the need for buffer or bubble legislation in Victoria to deny anti-choice protesters the right to harass women outside fertility clinics. "This legislation exists in Canada and some US states and is absolutely crucial in Australia to stop protesters trying to intimidate women from attending a women's health clinic." She explained that these anti-choice activists "call staff murderers and hold up posters which are offensive and misleading". In 2001, a gunman shot and killed a security guard at the East Melbourne Clinic.
Dr Leslie Cannold, author of The Abortion Myth, told the audience that 81% of Australians believe the decision to terminate a pregnancy is a woman's right. She questioned the motives of a number of male federal politicians currently campaigning to make changes to the Medicare provisions for this procedure, which is currently available under two Medicare item numbers. Cannold revealed that last August the federal government unsuccessfully tried to remove the funding for second trimester terminations.
"This legislative attempt was only revealed in December and we must understand what these people are trying to do to us." She added: "These people lie about abortion, claiming links to infertility and cancer in an attempt to show they care about women's bodies, but this obsession has put women's access to safe, legal and affordable terminations in Australia at greater risk than any other time since decriminalisation, more than 40 years ago."
From Green Left Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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