Cory Bernardi, it's not abortion campaigners who are pro-death. It's you

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/06/cory-bernardi-abortion-pro-death

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Cory Bernardi has just been defending his latest conservative screed about the terrible, unacceptable abortion rate – sorry, the abortion “death industry” – and how it needs to be curbed.

 “I think most people would like to see less abortions," Senator Bernardi piously told the ABC on Monday. “I think we need to start to investigate measures and ways in which we can assist in that regard.”

He’s almost certainly right on the first point: abortions, even now, are intrusive and unpleasant procedures that no-one would actively want to experience recreationally.

And hey, he might mean that we should be making contraception available to teenagers, institute comprehensive sexual education in schools that includes information about relationships and sex-for-pleasure, and for society to move toward a future in which women had more control over their lives and bodies, because all of those things have been demonstrated to reduce the rate of terminations. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this isn’t what he’s advocating.

According to his book, The Conservative Revolution, his issue is that abortion “despatches [sic] 80,000 to 100,000 unborn children every year" in Australia. So the issue would appear to be along traditional right to life line: all the tiny babies who are being robbed of the chance to live.

He’s deliberately overstating the best guess on the actual abortion rate, incidentally – records are kept differently in each state and the definitions are slightly different – but the Victorian Health Department’s Better Health website has the estimate of 70-80,000 per year nationally. But that’s a small niggle.

And hey, we can keep arguing endlessly over when exactly life begins, what the value of a potential person is over the worth of an existing one, and get nice and existential like we’re back in the first year of our arts degree. But, as it was back then, it’s a waste of time.

Instead, let’s just be clear what it is that we’re arguing over here.

The choice that Australian society has is not, despite the bleating of Bernardi and his conservative ilk, between having abortion and not having abortion.

The choice we have is between abortion and unsafe abortion.

Let’s start with the obvious: women can and do have sex without deliberately wanting to procreate. Sometimes women will get unexpectedly pregnant. Sometimes it’s despite all precautions. Sometimes it’s through carelessness. And sometimes it’s through rape.

Now, Bernardi is a religious conservative with a family values streak and is therefore unlikely to accept the notion that people shag for pleasure. And he might genuinely believe that the world would be a better place if people only had sex with a single partner within the bonds of matrimony.

And that’s fine: there are people who believe that the world would be better if everyone worshipped the sun god Ra, or if only one colour of humans prevailed. People can believe all sorts of things, but what you personally think would be nifty in an ideal fantasy world is irrelevant when you’re talking about public policy that affects an entire nation. 

Abortion is not a new subject. Hell, Socrates had a lot to say about it (he was in favour, incidentally, although largely as an alternative to infanticide). There has never been a society that didn’t have abortion of one kind or another, because there has never been a time when all pregnancies have been deliberate.

Throughout all known history there is evidence that women who got pregnant by accident did not universally sigh and stoically decide “OK, fine, let’s bear and raise us a child, then”.

Some did, of course. Others tried to trigger a miscarriage by throwing themselves off cliffs or down stairs. They took abortificant herbs: medieval English midwifes used to administer pennyroyal tea for this purpose, while early colonial Australians were taught the indigenous trick of chewing seeds of the Northern Cymbidium.

They fished the foetus out with hooks (there’s a reason that coat hangers are a recurring motif). They were often injured in the process, and frequently killed.

Conversely, when legal medical abortions are available, far fewer women are maimed or killed. When South Africa legalised abortion in 1996, they saw a staggering 90% drop in mortality among women seeking terminations.

And that is the choice that is open to us. We can either legislate that women who have sex deserve to be hurt and killed if they get unexpectedly pregnant, or we can decide that this is barbaric and legislate for safe, accessible, terminations.

Limiting abortion doesn’t save the tiny babies, Cory. It hurts and kills women.

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