Abortion rights inder attack

The World Health Organisation estimates that every year more than 20 million women terminate unwanted pregnancies through unsafe abortions that are likely to damage their health. 200,000 of these women die as a result. In virtually no country do women have unrestricted access to safe, legal, affordable abortion. Meanwhile, women all over the Third World and in the poor communities in the First World are undergoing forced sterilisation, or being used unwittingly or unwillingly to test experimental, long-acting contraceptive drugs such as Depo Provera and Norplant.

In Australia, abortion is still in state Crimes Acts across the country except in the ACT. The abortion services which were established out of campaigns by the women's movement in the 1970s and '80s are still very limited expensive, accessible only under certain conditions and located only in major cities. Today these services are under concerted attack by the ultraconservative anti-abortion lobby.

In the US, 25 years after women's right to choose was made legal by the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade judgement, abortion clinics are being bombed and doctors performing abortions are being murdered. Poor women and young women can no longer get a legal abortion in most US states. In Australia, while the attacks on women's right to choose have not been so extreme, in the last 10 years there have been more than a dozen legal challenges to the provision of abortion services.

Australian feminists' efforts over many years to have all abortion laws repealed (annulled) so as to make the decision about whether to have an abortion an unrestricted personal one for the woman concerned, have been blocked by the Democrats, ALP and Coalition parties' refusal to support the right to choose. These parties "conscience'' vote on abortion, combined with the refusal of any female politician in these parties to take a principled stand against their leaders and introduce a private member's bill on the issue, has ensured that the right-wing, anti-choice forces in Australia can still, at any time and in any state, move to have the existing laws tightened to restrict or deny legal access to abortion.

Ever since the large, public abortion rights campaigns of the women's liberation movement in the 1970s, the majority of Australians have supported women's right to choose. But maintaining that public support in the face of mounting backlash propaganda, and bringing that support to bear on politicians to force them to legislate for a complete withdrawal of government and the law from women's private lives, depends on feminists rebuilding a reproductive rights movement which is large, active and vocal enough to stop the conservative tide in Australian politics today. Claudine Holt - Sydney