Punishing the victims
On May 1, doctors in the public hospitals and one of the two private abortion clinics in WA stopped performing abortions.
These doctors do not oppose women's right to choose abortion. On the contrary, their vocal support for the decriminalisation of abortion in WA has placed them at the centre of that state's pro-choice movement in recent months. Rather, their decision to go on an "abortion strike" is intended to increase the pressure on the WA parliament to legislate quickly for decriminalisation.
The doctors' action is an expression of frustration at the success of the anti-choice MPs use of amendment after amendment to dilute and delay the passage of a private member's bill — put by Labor MLC Cheryl Davenport on March 10 — to repeal existing abortion laws. In the meantime, doctors who perform abortions continue to break the law and be liable to prosecution — just like Dr Victor Chan, whose charging on February 17 was the catalyst for the current debate. (Dr Chan's clinic is still performing abortions.)
The doctors are right that there is no excuse for delaying abortion law reform: the existing law had not, until the Chan case, been enforced for 30 years, with no ill effects for doctors, patients or society, and recent public opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority support the decriminalisation of abortion.
But the doctors are wrong in their choice of tactic. Not providing abortions will hurt many women — one week after the doctors withdrew the service, the Family Planning Association in WA had already referred 15 women to services interstate.
For the many women who cannot afford the $500 or more that it costs to travel to a capital city interstate, or who cannot take the time off work, or who do not want family or friends to know that they have had the operation, this can only mean considerable hardship.
For some, self-mutilation or dangerous backyard operations will be the only option.
But it is not just, or even primarily because of the harm done to individual women that the doctors' tactic is wrong.
It is also wrong because it won't work. This tactic relies on moral pressure and if moral pressure was effective against our politicians, state and federal parliaments would long ago have passed legislation to prevent poverty, unemployment, imprisonment and every other source of mass human suffering.
Certainly, the anti-choice politicians won't be morally persuaded to support reform. On the contrary, they will probably revel in every abortion that a women in WA cannot now obtain, and in every woman who arrives bleeding in the casualty ward, "punished" for committing the "sin" of abortion.
Neither will the remaining MPs be persuaded by the personal misfortune of a few dozen women.
The only pressure sufficient to force the WA parliament to immediately decriminalise abortion is political pressure — the pressure generated by large numbers of people uniting to publicly express their support for women's right to choose and, in the process, winning even more people to actively support their demands.
Unfortunately, it has been the anti-choice minority in WA, not the pro-choice majority, which has used this sort of political pressure effectively over the last three months.
Had the feminist movement done as the right wing has and organised rallies of thousands of people outside parliament, taken the pro-choice message into the streets, campuses, high schools, universities and workplaces in a campaign aimed at exerting political rather than moral pressure on the politicians, the doctors may not have felt the need to resort to desperate tactics which only punish the victims of the current law.
By Lisa Macdonald