The SMH informs us of a new organisation formed within the Australian Labor Party, one that seeks to impose compulsory pregnancy on the women of Australia. Senator Claire Moore has this piece of wisdom for us:
“It’s a message to those of us who feel differently, that we can never be complacent,”
As Anne Summers reported in Damned whores and god’s police (1975, p. 319), contraceptions and abortifacients were freely available in Australia from the 1880s onwards. These were advertised and sold openly, over the counter. It was not until the men in power became obsessed with nation-building, family values and population growth of the new colony, that attention was paid to the “injurious nature” of contaceptives and abortifacients. This was when women’s right to limit their child-bearing began to be undermined in Australia. Limiting access was for their own good you see. Because just as now, women were not seen as having any insight or wisdom regarding what was good for their bodies. This was probably around the time that narratives of motherhood as a moral obligation began to take hold. Position this shift within a context where women had no legal right to refuse their husband sex, in a colony where women were, and had always been, shipped here specifically to service men’s sexual needs. The right to bodily sovereignty and the power to control their reproductive functioning to avoid endless, and usually fatal, sequences of pregnancies, was imperative not just for women to participate equally in society, but to actually survive.
Until recently, it appeared that among the mainstream parties the Liberal National Party was women’s worst enemy as far as forced-birthers trying to influence policy around reproductive freedom. Tony Abbott, who tried to block the sale of the abortion drug RU486 during his time as health minister, has been one of the loudest proponents of forced birthing, and what he has called “the national tragedy” of abortion rates. Abbott’s misogyny is well-documented. He has been known to direct rape jokes towards the Prime Minister Julia Gillard, among other offences.
Now it might appear that radical feminists were right all along; neither of the major parties gives much of a crap about women, despite the ALP electing one as leader. The earlier formal controls over women’s right to not give birth, lack of citizenship and civil and political rights, have been replaced with widespread and relentless informal social controls. Intensive socialisation as a sexual class of beings; sexual empowerment rhetoric, the rise of raunch culture and the right to pole dance, pick-up culture and sexual violence, the socialisation of boys as predatory studs, the promotion of wedding culture, sex therapy that promotes women’s compliance and men’s right to intercourse, Viagra, domestic violence, shifts in family law, and the reduction of social security rights for mothers.
In such a climate, where men freely pornify, stalk, rape and impregnate us, while simultaneously reducing our rights to the resources and supports needed to take care of children; when pregnancy means serious risks to physical and mental health and the increased risk of violence, poverty and homelessness, how can the supposedly more progressive major party sprout an anti-abortion group within itself?
Excellent post.
Corporate patriarchy has found buying left wing parties better than their more traditional tactic of buying right wing parties, because you take out the opposition at the same time. In the UK they did it with Blair and New Labour and left wing voters have still not fully recognised what happened to them. They have done it with Obama in the US, this leaves the left wing without a voice in any of the major Western governments. We are going to have to build new parties or storm the Bastille to turn back this tide.
Contraception is very ancient, women have had access to it for thousands of years, when males take traditional medical roles from females, control over childbirth and contraception is always the main motive.