Claudine Holt
For abortion law repeal
Justice Newman's April 18 ruling that abortion is still illegal in NSW is a dangerous threat to the limited legal access to abortion rights in the state. Unless we take up the struggle to decriminalise abortion, we will face a similar situation to that in the US, where the right wing has monopolised the agenda and debate on reproductive rights and rolled back abortion access.
What started as a compensation case against alleged medical malpractice has ended up questioning the interpretation, the Levine ruling, which liberalised abortion access.
Justice Newman's decision has broken the surface consensus around women's access to abortion. It narrowly defines what is a lawful abortion and opens up the possibility of prosecutions. It increases the monitoring and policing of abortion provision and gives the Right to Life greater opportunity to overturn the Levine ruling and have sections 82, 83, and 84 of the NSW Crimes Act again be used to stop women from obtaining abortions.
The Right to Life and other conservative forces view the Newman decision as a victory; it has visibly boosted their confidence. Protests outside abortion clinics have been stepped up, and they've even called for the reintroduction of police abortion squads. After years of harassing doctors, attempts to remove abortion from Medicare funding, bills to define human life as beginning at the moment of conception and harassing women seeking abortions, their activity in the current context is the most dangerous threat to abortion rights yet.
We must respond to these attempts to overturn abortion access. There has been no better time to launch a campaign to repeal all laws relating to abortion.
We must campaign as the women's movement successfully did in the '60s and '70s to reaffirm women's right to choose safe and accessible abortion. The early movement was successful in changing community attitudes to the point where the most recent survey on abortion showed 82% support women's right to choose.
We should consolidate this majority support with a repeal campaign and drive back the Right to Life's interference in women's control over their lives and their bodies.
[Claudine Holt is the author of Abortion: A woman's right to choose.]