aid
27 Jan 2009
Australia's Abortion Gag
In one of his first official acts, Barack Obama has lifted a ban on foreign aid to organisations that provide abortion counselling and services. We're now the only country in the world with such a ban, writes Ruby Murray
Once upon a time, an Australian federal government decided that the lives of countless women in developing countries were less important than the sale of Telstra. In 1996, in return for Senator Brian Harradine’s support of the Telstra sale, the Howard government placed a ban on the provision of Australian foreign aid to abortion-related services.
For a little while in June last year, it seemed like we might care about the women affected by this ban. Small noises were made about debating the issue in parliament. We’re thinking about it, people from the Department of Foreign Affairs kept mumbling.
Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and his colleagues in the Labor caucus, however, are slow thinkers.
While the Federal Government has been pondering how much of a hassle it is for Australia to lift its ban, the following things have happened: The season changed four times; My sister had a child, who is now just about to start crawling; An estimated 5 million women became temporarily or permanently disabled after seeking out an unsafe abortion; And an estimated 67,000 women died from complications associated with unsafe abortions, leaving many more children without mothers.
Australia and the United States were once the only countries in the world where an equivalent abortion ban applied to the provision of foreign aid. Under Barack Obama, the US has now lifted the ban, adding to the pressure on Australia to follow suit. It took Obama all of four days in office to reverse the legislation. Kevin Rudd, on the other hand, has been side-stepping the issue for 15 months, presumably in an effort to keep the important Senate vote of Family First’s Steve Fielding on side.
In essence, the ban means that Australian aid funds are not available to activities involving abortion training, services, research, or provision, even where the life of the mother is at stake.
Not only does Australia refuse to train doctors in the provision of safe abortions, we won’t provide funds to any groups or organisations that dare to give women information on abortions, whether or not the organisation itself performs them. Doctors receiving Australian Government aid are therefore unable to counsel women who are seeking an abortion, or to help them differentiate between a safe and an unsafe abortion.
This is despite the fact that abortion is freely available to women in our own country, and despite the fact that Victoria has recently decriminalised the procedure. The only message one can take from this is that the Australian Government believes women in poor and developing countries are not entitled to the same rights as Australian women.
Providing funds for abortion services and counselling is not about "advocating" abortion. It is about recognising that women will seek to abort regardless of how you might personally feel about it, and that access to abortion information and services is a key element in any effective family planning policy that has women’s health as its final goal. The truth is that the number of women who will seek abortions remains roughly the same regardless of whether or not the abortion is provided in a safe, legal, medical environment, or whether the procedure is unsafe and illegal.
Successive studies have shown that women who want abortions will find a way to have them, regardless of their legality and whether or not Australia deigns to help them. What separates women’s experiences of abortion in the developed world from those in the developing world is that 92 per cent of abortions in the developed world are safe, while over half the abortions performed in the developing world — 55 per cent — are unsafe.
I use the word "unsafe" to describe these abortions because that’s how the World Health Organization categorises them. But "unsafe" seems a very pedestrian, mundane little word for the procedures it actually describes. The methods of abortion that leading sexual health research centre the Guttmacher Institute categorises as "unsafe" — and which women regularly obtain for themselves when safe procedures are unavailable — include: Drinking turpentine, bleach or tea made with livestock manure; Inserting herbal preparations into the vagina or cervix; And placing foreign bodies, such as a stick, coat hanger or chicken bone, into the uterus.
Australian funding of family planning programs across the entire aid sector has declined as a percentage of total aid from 0.44 per cent to 0.07 per cent since 1996. In absolute terms, it has dropped from $6.8 million in 1995/6 to a paltry $2.28 million in 2006/07. Concerned NGOs have argued forcefully that the guidelines introduced by Senator Harradine in 1996 are acting as a disincentive to Australian aid providers attempting to deliver sexual and reproductive health rights.
And still Minister Smith considers, and waits, and hopes we’ll forget about the hypocrisy of refusing to provide the same basic services for women in our aid programs that we recognise as central to women’s health within our own borders.
All of this pain, just so that the Federal Government doesn’t have to step on the toes of Senator Steve Fielding and the pro-life lobby.
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All I can Say is WOW. The Australian Labor Party, really has LOST its way.
This goes to the Core!
Am glad that you guys have Outed them on this.
Look forward to seeing whether or not something is done ASAP
http://pyrmontvillage.com.au/
This was nothing more than a sap to Harradine - god only knows why we still have it.
It is insane
The institution of womanhood is no different in foreign countries than anywhere else.
To maintain a ban on aid to those women less ignorant than us on safe methods of abortion is ludicrous.
The abortion debate will never go away so the next thing the government can do is see to it that uneducated women in foreign countries get the help they need. The self-mutilation they perform is sending the wrong message to others in the same situation that it is the only alternative.
Nobody has any right to tell a woman what to do with her body, that’s crap. Only the doctor who treats her if either she or the foetus is at risk. It should be a medically based decision and not a bombardment of those ignoramuses waving placards in the street who think they know what they are talking about.
There is such a thing as viability of the foetus, any medically trained person knows that. So leave the medical decisions to the experts and not a bunch of ignorant know-it-alls who think that by shouting loud enough that everybody will believe them.
I worked in a women’s outpatient clinic in a major Sydney hospital and I can tell you first hand, that not one decision the obstetrician made was morally based, it was medical.
Some doctors even refused to perform abortions on drug addicted mothers who were coming in for their third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh abortion. Some were more than 24 weeks and coming into the clinic in withdrawal, amongst the women waiting to be seen by the Fertility clinic.
One even said he was not going to be used as a condom and a few were sent away. It became a convenience for the dregs of society to ‘come in and get rid of it’ because they were unawrae they were ovulating while using recreational drugs and fell pregnant. No excuse.
The point is, it is too easy to get an abortion here. But the information is there. There is no excuse here for being ignorant about abortion. We have a choice to read or not read about help information.
Women living in Third World countries do not have that choice. Access to this kind of vital information that allows them to consider all avenues mentally and physically before proceeding to the procedure, is denied them because of a political agenda. Disgraceful.
The government should arrange to have all the hard copy information translated and bulk send them. It is not advocating abortion, just the education women need to consider it.
Harry Morton Obama has managed in a few short days to antagonize the Vatican and the Religious Right with his support for abortion and embryo stem cell research, the CIA with closing their secret concentration camps overseas and the Cuban one, the car manufacturers ordering them to stop making petrol guzzlers and make a fuel efficient car, the Klu Klux Clan because he is black and a whole contingent of white US racists. There is only one fate for such a wonderful, inspiring man, he has to be assassinated
The Rudd government can do better, it must do better, lest the more it approximates the former Howard government, the less appealing to ‘fair go’ Aussie it becomes.
Just like the Internet filter scheme and the undemocratic decision to retain the daily Parliamentary Lord’s Prayer, this piece of Howard-era foreign aid policy is another example of soft theocracy at its grubbiest.
An evidence-based approach, Prime Minister Rudd: that’s what you promised Australia. Let’s see it in action.
I’m with Jaqueline on the question of abortions in countries like Australia. With 70 000 + per year, too many people are using abortions as condoms..that should change…
But…Any argument I would ever make about abortion being morally wrong is confined to a country like Australia, where people are mostly educated, and access to contraception is rife.
There is no excuse for taking abortion off table in developing countries. It is a disgrace. We should be ashamed of our now unilateral outlier status.
What a heart-breaking article: ‘Drinking turpentine, bleach or tea made with livestock manure’. I am furious that the Rudd government needs time to think about lifting this cruel ban. And to placate Steve Fielding? The man that the Victorian ALP gave prefence to because they didn’t want the Greens to get in. Could all these men just go away and do their dick-linking in private and let us get on with it. Helen
Michelle Grattan in today’s Age, “Bob McMullan, parliamentary secretary for international development assistance, is strongly urging the Government to follow the Obama example and end the ban on aid money funding abortion advice or services.”
http://www.theage.com.au/national/bid-to-end-abortion-aid-ban-20090128-7…
Managing Editor
newmatilda.com
What a spineless lot of wimps our Federal government politicians are. Even the Victorian State politicians are ahead of them. Ruby Murray’s article is a revelation to me and it makes me very disappointed in the Rudd government. It is shameful that we have been following Howard’s line on this, as we are on quite a few other things as well. What the devil are the women in the Federal Labour Party doing? I foolishly assumed that they would fight for women when they were elected. I thank our Managing Editor for his comment that Bob McMullan is taking an interest in this matter; it gives me some hope that our politicians may eventually do the correct thing. Excellent, informative articles such as this are why New Matilda is such a brilliant website!
Thank you Managing Editor for bringing this article to our attention.
It is brief but concise; the message is clear: do something about it.
There are several things I thought of while reading Michelle Grattan’s piece:
Funny how we are always accustomed to hearing the government’s answers to public scrutiny through a pinhead attitude. Like naughty school boys, feeling guilty about being caught smoking behind the toilet block. Since when is this a topic to be put in the too hard basket? Or the “I-don’t-care’ out box?
I see that the female coningent of parliament are not afraid to stand up and be counted with the first caucus meeting of the year on Monday.
More prominent women with any clout at all - and that means high profile media representatives on television such as Tracy Grimshaw, Leila Mckinnon or Kerrie-Anne Kennerley should shame the designated government spokesperson into an interview to put on some public pressure.
Then A Current Affair should take one of their polls to further push the cause. And of course, CNN or CBS may pick up the story and put on a similar shame pressure.
This is something that Australian women find shocking and abhorrent that we are prepared to help developing countries in other ways but on this issue.
Where is the professional detachment from personal beliefs?
Get a national poll and put pressure on this government.
Whilst being aware that this was, at least previously, the policy in the US I only recently became aware that it was in fact the policy in Australia. Has there been any change in the current situation in terms of our government considering lifting this policy? The article I read that discussed this issue suggested that we should all write to the Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith indicating our opinion that they should end this policy. I intend to do so, as well as also writing to Julia Gillard, but wondered whether there has been any progress as the article I read was printed a little while ago Cheer.