Leslie Cannold
Recently, ABC TV's Compass program screened a documentary about abortion. The British filmmaker Julia Black is the daughter of the founder of Marie Stopes International. Heavily pregnant during the filming, Black sets out to revisit the abortion she had when she was 21, and to answer the question: "Can one actually look at the facts of abortion, and still be pro-choice?"
The film provoked a fair bit of media hype, focused mostly on the televising of a first-trimester abortion. Yet, it's fair to say that it disappointed in the end. Compass's ratings dropped on the night, and anecdotal evidence suggests that those who did tune in found the film both boring and self-indulgent.
Despite this, My Foetus may have a lasting impact on the abortion debate in Australia. On the positive side, by showing the abortion procedure, Black demystified it, and hopefully reduced the fear that can lead women to delay seeking a termination. This appears to be what happened in the UK, where immediately following the screening there, demand for the procedure increased.
Also positive was the consolidation of recent attempts by younger pro-choice activists to assert the morality, and not just the necessity, of the pro-choice position. Black's film doesn't argue but simply presumes that abortion is a moral issue and, in doing so, backs up the claim I made to this effect in my 1998 book The Abortion Myth.
Black also seemed determined to use her film to reclaim the foetus, rather than seeing it as the property of either side in the debate — another key issue for younger pro-choice activists.
But here's where things went pear-shaped. Black's acknowledgement of the ethical dimensions of the abortion issue led her to uncritically accept the anti-choice moral perspective on abortion. Ditto her attempt to take account of the foetus — she did it all the anti-choice way.
The morality of abortion, the film argued, was to be discerned through a physical examination of the actual procedure. "Facts" about "the" foetus were the only ones necessary to decide whether the procedure was justified.
The film didn't just recount women's stories — the events leading up to a crisis pregnancy, the decision-making process women or couples undertake — to the margins; it eliminated them from picture altogether. As a consequence only the (factually inaccurate) anti-choice thesis "looks like a baby, is a baby" remained.
"Where were those foetuses' mummies?" was a question the filmmaker never asked. Instead, in trademark anti-choice style Black kept women, their bodies and their lives just outside the frame.
The film also emboldened anti-choice politicians like federal health minister Tony Abbott. Several months earlier, Abbott had made his regret over his department's funding of abortion public and urged fellow Catholics to use their collective strength to challenge existing laws. Now, Abbott was back in the news, vowing "sincere support" for any effort to "unambiguously ban" mid-trimester abortions.
Melinda Tankard Reist's brigade — Women Hurt By Abortion — also came out of the woodwork to bemoan their abortions, and to patronisingly suggest (but to lack the integrity to say so directly) that because they made a bad decision in the past, the freedom of all women to choose in the future should be denied.
In all but name, My Foetus was an anti-choice film. Consequently, the anti-choice world-view got the biggest boost from its debut, while women pursuing the liberty to make and accept responsibility for major choices in their lives lost. But the screening of the film, and the flurry surrounding it, was just one tiny battle in the long and seemingly unending war that sadly may always surround women's freedom to choose abortion.
[Dr Leslie Cannold is a fellow at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. This article is based on a speech given to a Socialist Alliance public meeting on August 25.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 8, 2004.
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