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As Mark Powell observed in a recent article, one of the main agendas of abortion advocacy is the ‘normalisation’ of abortion, in large part by stressing the allegedly high numbers of women obtaining terminations. Facing challenges when pregnant? So have an abortion. Everyone else is having one, so it’s entirely unremarkable — or so the meme goes.
What the activists’ tactic raises is some interesting questions about what kind of ‘normal’ we want to live with. While over a lifetime, if abortion rates remain static, 20-25% of women having abortions may be close to accurate, this is not representative of all women. We can’t all look around our social group and imagine one in four in four or five of us have had an abortion, because not all women are equal in this regard.
This survey of women accessing abortion in Victoria provides us a more accurate picture of a different kind of ‘normal’ for a particular group of women. Some 51 per cent of the women seeking abortion were holders of a healthcare card at a time when only 23 per cent of the general population had them. This is an extraordinarily high, given that it includes only women of reproductive age, most of whom are in their 20’s. It fits what we know about why most women access abortion — a lack of economic, material, or social support.
South Australia, one of only two states collecting statistics on abortion, demonstrates similar reasons, with 95.4 per cent of abortions in 2014 listed as being for ‘mental health of the woman’, which is simply an umbrella term to encompass social issues. Of more than 4600 abortions in that year, only four women — 0.1 per cent — were reported as having an actual mental health problem. The 2014 report also provides a figure of around 36 per cent of women having more than one abortion. We still don’t have enough information about the numbers, or anything like a full grasp, of the reasons abortions are obtained. Yet based on nothing but activists’ rhetoric, governments are legislating the reinforcement of an attitude of extreme paternalism toward those who are perhaps deemed less worthy of the children they can’t afford.
With legislation in place which deters doctors from providing effective screening or alternative action for an unintended pregnancy, no woman can feel confident that her real needs or risk factors will ever be identified or met with anything but abortion being proferred as the commonplace solution.
This all means the process of normalising which abortion advocates have been so keen to promote, and now governments, ask us to accept that women without resources should continue to be provided abortion as a solution to their largely social problems. This is neatly packaged and sold to everyone as ‘reproductive freedom’ and ‘choice’.
The process by which the killing of the unborn has become unremarkable is arguably one of the greatest and most successful manipulations of the public mind in recent times. Alarmist abstraction recruits to the cause: ‘women will die’ , ‘women aren’t equal without abortion’. Controlling the dominant discourse keeps us in line, particularly with its focus on silencing and discrediting dissenters.
After all, only extremists could possibly object when abortion is, as we are tirelessly told, just so ‘normal’.
I am not a fan of aborting babies.
Mrs J (name changed) was married to a man who, at various times during their turbulent 2-year marriage. Beat her senseless, put a dog leash and chain on her and tied her up in the dog’s kennel and left her there overnight, regularly backhanded her as a method of communication out of nowhere to “keep her in line”.
The animal repeated his history with his next wife who he hospitalized, burning her chest with an iron because she had not ironed his shirt correctly, yes thats right he ironed her chest leaving iron shaped scars. He is currently in gaol for that outrage, I hope he rots.
It wasn’t the poor little mites fault its father was an animal but she simply couldn’t face carrying the child to term once we got her out from under she would become frantic at the mention of her X, how on earth could she continue with the baby when she knew it would tie her to someone who had tormented her?
I get that lived experiences are poor argumentation but I honestly believe that these circumstances albeit rarely as difficult as Mrs J faced are a common factor. It’s not all about women using abortion as birth control and deadbeat dads, there is an endless number of reasons why women seek to abort their unborn children, some better than others.
Those hard cases are hard but that’s not what the article is about. An acquaintance, young, healthy, middle-income professional, three children, went to the doctor, having missed a period, and was told ‘You’re pregnant …’ and without taking a breath the doctor asked, ‘do you want an abortion?’ As far as that doctor was concerned, abortion was a mere lifestyle choice, a normal event. That’s the tragedy we’re seeing more and more.
“…a lack of economic, material, or social support”? I would put it down to a simple, old fashioned, narcissistic immorality.
It is a pity that the harridans demanding abortions were not themselves terminated at six weeks. It is amazing that they want what their mothers unfortunately did not.
have to agree with Lawrie.
However, the “can’t afford to have a baby” line is absurd when adoption agencies have 50 good couples available for every baby: and that’s not taking into account all of the couples who don’t bother applying to adopt because they know how absurd the odds are. An “unwanted” child is very much wanted, by many would be parents.
A snapshot of 60 years ago. I delivered 600 babies. I adopted out 30 babies. [5%]. Nobody complained.
25% were shotgun babies who came six months after the wedding. The rest were #2 #3 and #4.
I dealt with the fallout from one criminal abortion @ 20 weeks. Nobody was prosecuted.
One girl turned up in labour without even knowing that she was pregnant.
You did amazing work at the Mater Hospital Pathology Dept in Brisbane!
“My body; my choice” many women say.
But I don’t care about THEIR body; I do care about the baby’s body. The first moment of life for ALL humans began at the moment of conception. So why not live and let live unless mother’s life is in danger, or the fetus is deformed or diseased. Abortions should be the exception, not the rule.
Rob:
“… It’s not all about women using abortion as birth control and deadbeat dads, there is an endless number of reasons why women seek to abort their unborn children, some better than others.”
Hear, hear.
Should, for example, a woman be forced to bear the child of a stranger who has assaulted and raped her, whether she wants to bear it or not?
Ian asks: “Should, for example, a woman be forced to bear the child of a stranger who has assaulted and raped her, whether she wants to bear it or not?”
If ever there were a solid case for the termination of a pregnancy, this would be it.
The horror of having to live with and bring up that child in unimaginable.
Good on you, Ian. Also praise for signing your name. Too much anonymous stuff gets published.
Dr Peter Arnold OAM Sydney
Yes, how many think about the 12 year old child “brides” of the adult male islamists?
The supreme irony of abortion is that in a society where the left are obsessed with the “human rights” of our most vulnerable, the only human whose human rights they ignore are those of our most vulnerable: the unborn human child. And what is their justification for denying human rights to the unborn human child? Answer: Location! Far from being the self-professed, espoused “pacifists” who hate things like war, the left are in actual fact the most insidiously barbaric and dangerous people in our society. Things aren’t much better in the United States. Planned Parenthood Inc – a company started by a eugenicist – kills over a million unborn babies in the US annually, and it should come as no surprise that it is one of The Democrats’ biggest funders.
If men were able to become pregnant we’d have Drive Through abortions by now.
Difficult question. I can imagine the decades of wistfulness suffered by women who have had an abortion; the wondering how their lives may have been different (happier, sadder, more fulfilled, more, or less, successful, fewer great trips overseas, more stressful, sadder, wondering, wondering!)
‘Common’ and ‘Normal’ are not the same thing.
The specious excuses and assumptions which are put forward with such force (and often rage and violence) in favour of abortion are themselves terminated by the evidence:
* Until the cultural tsunami of the sexual revolution and its reversion of all moral standards in the 70s, abortion was regarded generally as a crime. Even today, abortionists are barely clinging on to the bottom rung of the medical profession (“What’s your specialty, Louis? ” “Oh, killing unborn babies; pays well.”
* The data and research showing myriad, severe physiological and/or psychological damage of women who thought their abortions would leave them free and unencumbered. I’ve listened to hundreds of them.
* The complete and utter lack of support by the pro-aborts for the obvious solution which benefits mother and baby and childless couples: adoption. Any female can walk into an abortion business and get rid of the baby, as long as she can pay. Try to adopt. Just try.
* If bringing up a child who at the beginning of its life was “unwanted” was as hard as abortion activists claim, the streets would be littered with the bodies of murdered babies and suicided mothers.
* Life has an amazing facility to make room for a child, no matter the circumstances.
* It is ironic the greatest proponents of killing the unborn were themslves permitted to be born. Perhaps their mothers really, consistently, did not want them. Those people, I feel sorry for.
Killing human life is always or should be always a deeply moral issue. It is morally permissible for many reasons : defence of self, defence of another, justifiable war, an inevitable concomitant of strong painkilling medication to relieve suffering, and other reasons. Why should it be permissible at mere whim at some particular point in the human life cycle ? And when it becomes acceptable at whim at one point of the life cycle, what will stop it becoming acceptable at other points of the life cycle? And has this, indeed, been our experience: with abortion being demanded at whim up to, and now , by some, after birth?