It can happen here
Baghdad, Maastricht, Tokyo, Dubrovnik: these are words associated with the emerging post-Cold War political and economic order. For feminists around the world, the words Wichita and Dublin are surely just as evocative: the outcome of battles over abortion taking place in those cities will help determine the status of women in the New World Order.
In Wichita, Kansas, right-to-life demonstrators scream at women entering the abortion clinic not to murder their baby; in Dublin, the High Court tells a 14-year-old rape victim that it is against the constitution to attempt to terminate her pregnancy.
As the television news beams the more sensational aspects of all this into our living rooms, it might be tempting to take comfort in the thought that it could never happen here.
This is certainly the implication of much of the media reporting of the Irish case now, and the situation in Romania during the overthrow of Ceausescu in the winter of 1989-90.
Then, reporters entering Ceausescu's AIDS-riddled orphanages spoke in horrified tones of a country in which contraception was outlawed and pregnancy virtually the preferred permanent state for all fertile women, with thousands of abandoned children the tragic consequence.
Now, in a report from London about the Irish case, Telegraph Mirror correspondent Bruce Baskett ranged over the Catholic approach to God, sin and censorship, and noted that "even this article could be subject to prosecution if the paper you are reading was sold or distributed in Ireland".
But the smug liberalism in this Sydney newspaper is somewhat misplaced. It was, after all, the Telegraph Mirror which recently ran two pages of ban 'em and burn 'em letters against the Family Planning Association's Making Sense of Sex diary project. (The federal government has now cut off funding for the diary.)
If abortion is something the majority think is a woman's right to choose (polls consistently indicate this), and if it is a procedure thousands of women experience every year, then why is it still illegal?
Fred Nile's version of the NSW abortion laws — a strict interpretation that would return women to the days of fear, guilt and danger that is now the lot of Irish women — is more in keeping with the spirit of the law than the Levine ruling which makes it possible for women to obtain abortions.
It's true that we have a different social culture than that which exists in Ireland or Romania, or even Wichita. But the same oppressive ideological threads — that "women's lot" is inevitably tied to child bearing and rearing, and personal sacrifice and suffering — run through all these societies. Without a renewed commitment to maintaining our place and moving forward in this war of position, the anti-woman lobby could start winning some victories
By Tracy Sorensen