By Tracy Sorensen
The landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade decision of the US Supreme Court, which has guaranteed the right of women to choose abortion during the first three months of pregnancy, would almost certainly be overturned in the next six to 12 months, Australian feminist Anne Summers told a meeting at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe, Sydney, on September 18.
The forum, on legal and political challenges to abortion in Australia and the US, was organised by Writers in the Park and the Feminist Book Fortnight.
Summers, author of Damned Whores and Gods Police, and now the editor of the US feminist magazine Ms, said that the politics of abortion in the US had become "brutally clear" and that "so far, women are losing".
Lyndall Ryan, who is organising a research project comparing abortion services in South Australia with other states, said that abortion services carried out within designated hospitals, as required by state legislation, were inferior to those available in private feminist clinics in Victoria and NSW.
She described a series of attacks on abortion rights in South Australia since 1988, and the struggle to set up a more independent pregnancy advice centre attached to one of Adelaide's major hospitals.
The forum was chaired by Wendy McCarthy, long-time family planning worker and now executive director of the National Trust. She said that strategic planning for a campaign to defend abortion rights would be of enormous importance over the next six months.
She suggested that the women's movement return to a campaign to have abortion laws wiped from legal statutes altogether, rather than simply defend the existing fragile legal situation for abortion rights in the various states.
Anne Summers described how Roe vs Wade had been weakened by the 1989 ruling Webster vs Reproductive Health Services, which allowed the states to regulate access to abortion.
"This opened the floodgates", she said, "and in the two years since that decision, every state legislature has voted on bills that would, one way or another, restrict women's access to abortion".
Most state legislatures had defeated anti-abortion bills, or their governors had vetoed them. But Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Utah and the territory of Guam had passed restrictive laws.
The Louisiana law was the most restrictive, prohibiting abortion in all circumstances except those performed in the first trimester to save the mother's life, to remove a dead foetus or in limited cases of rape or incest — and only then if the crime is reported within seven days.
The Pennsylvania law requires a 24-hour waiting period, prior an's husband and counselling about foetal development.
The Louisiana and Pennsylvania laws have been ruled unconstitutional by lower courts because they conflict with Roe vs Wade. Both are now making their way to the Supreme Court via the appeals system.
"The betting at present is that the Pennsylvania law will get there first, although the backers of the Louisiana bill have stated publicly that they want their law to be the one that puts the nail into Roe vs Wade", said Summers.
The composition of the Supreme Court has moved to the right, with the retirement in July of the liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall and the likely Senate approval of the conservative Bush nominee, Clarence Thomas.
"Bush, who demonstrated his utter cynicism in 1979 by changing his position on abortion in order to get on Ronald Reagan's [presidential] ticket, has given the green light to his henchmen to do whatever they need to do to rescind the federally protected right to abortion", said Summers. "There seems little doubt that he will succeed."
Roe vs Wade had been weakened over recent years by Supreme Court decisions forbidding Medicaid funding for abortions or information about abortion being given at federally funded clinics, and by the cessation of funding for birth control programs involving abortion in the Third World.
Meanwhile, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue was continuing a "Summer Offensive" against an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Thousands of anti-abortion protesters, including bishops, priests and nuns, have thrown themselves to the ground outside the clinic, attempting to stop women from entering, despite several federal court orders for them to desist. Thousands have been arrested, and hundreds jailed.
"To me, the most telling aspect of watching this night after night on television has been the diligence of the Wichita police in protecting the right of women to enter the clinic", said Summers. "They have dragged off the demonstrators, all of whom have resisted arrest and have had to be hog-tied and carried off to waiting buses to be hauled off to jail.
"There's only one reason they have done this, and it's called Roe vs Wade. They have been upholding the law. Once that law is overturned, we'll be back to the bad old days that some of us here are old enough to remember, and unfortunate enough to have experienced, of backyard abortions and the police protecting another law, the one that says abortion is illegal."
The right to abortion had once again become the major issue galvanising US feminism. However, said Summers, "I feel that American feminists are not only not winning, they are falling further behind in both the strategic and propaganda wars".
She said that while there were demonstrations, lobbying and a lot of court action, the movement seemed to be concentrating too much on fundraising and too little on strategic planning.
On the other hand, there were heroic battles being fought by women working in clinics under constant siege from Operation Rescue. Summers said that it was also worth pausing to think of the ordeal being faced by women attempting to exercise their right to legal abortion.
"Those of us who have had abortions know that it is never an easy decision or a pleasant experience, however good the clinic and the counsellors. But most of us have fortunately never had to be [taken] into a clinic by sympathisers who hid our faces from television cameras with huge umbrellas while thousands of people chanted hysterically, 'Don't kill your baby!'"
If Roe vs Wade is overturned, the right to abortion will be governed by the 50 state legislatures. Access to safe abortion would once again depend on wealth, availability of underground information and the ability to travel.
In the longer term, said Summers, the experience of restricted access to abortion would cause a backlash against anti-abortion forces. Meanwhile, the right was still supported by a clear majority of US citizens.
Lyndall Ryan explained that under the 1969 South Australian abortion legislation, which came into effect in 1970, abortions have to be carried out in designated hospitals, thus precluding private feminist clinics. A woman seeking an abortion has to have the signatures of two doctors and must have been resident in SA for two months. Any medical provider can refuse to provide an abortion on grounds of conscience, and the foetus has to be of no more than 28 weeks gestation.
The legislation seemed to have two contradictory aims, said Ryan: on the one hand, it limited the availability of abortion, while on the other treating it as though it were a part of the general provision of health services.
A 1988 private member's bill had attempted to restrict access by reducing the limit from 28 to 24 weeks and requiring that one of the doctors' signatures be that of a psychiatrist. The bill was narrowly defeated.
The anti-abortion lobby then began a campaign directed at doctors and nurses, urging them not to perform second trimester abortions. This ended in success: in June 1988, all services for second trimester abortions in SA hospitals ceased. Women (often country teenagers who had been ill advised about their pregnancies) were bused to Sydney for their abortions. The SA service resumed in early 1991.
Since the early '80s, said Ryan, "there has been a general deterioration in the general provision of abortion services in SA."
She said that while abortion is a relatively simple procedure, "very few medical staff can do it." New technology, available in Victoria and NSW and used in private feminist clinics, was not being brought across state borders.
When counselling women seeking abortions, Ryan advises them to travel h Wales if they can afford it, where they will get better and more sympathetic service.
"We have now reached the stage where in Adelaide there are probably at the most only four doctors who are performing terminations and probably only about 10 nursing staff who are willing to be on deck when these terminations are performed. This is a disgraceful state of affairs."
Twenty years of legalised abortions had not fundamentally changed the attitudes of medical staff.
In 1986, a government report suggested that special outreach clinics for first and second trimester abortions should be set up as adjuncts to the four major hospitals. In 1988, the SA government agreed to develop one of the recommended clinics.
Once approval in principle was given, it took 18 months for the government, facing a vigorous campaign by the Right to Life, to make funding for it available. The centre is due to open in February 1992.
"I personally will not feel relieved until the doors of that centre open", said Ryan. "In South Australia we consider the war was only half won by the legislation of 1969. We have not been able to break the restrictive features of that legislation."
"In 1969 we thought South Australia had all the answers", said Wendy McCarthy, "but listening to Lyndall, it's clear it didn't.
"I used to be in a group called the Abortion Law Repeal Association. I think perhaps that we should be returning to a campaign to have abortion laws repealed altogether."