Our People

Abortion: The debate we had to have

Parliament House, Brisbane

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
11 June 2005

1. Why do I stand alone today?

My address today was supposed to be part of a debate, but no-one could be found from abortion industry and its networks willing to debate me. Is it that I so scary? I doubt it. Is it that the leaders of the abortion industry and their supporters have all given up, decided to pack it in, go home, forget the awful abortion experiment and join us in building a new alternative? I’d love to think so, but I suspect it is more about unease than conversion. Still, you have to start somewhere. And it is abundantly clear that after two smug decades when so-called ‘abortion rights’ were sacrosanct, cracks are now appearing in the social compact on abortion.

Last year the Federal Minister for Health and Ageing, Mr Tony Abbott, made the courageous claim that “Even those who think that abortion is a women’s right should be troubled by the fact that 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year.” This would have been unimaginable from a Health Minister in the past two decades. He also described our abortion epidemic as a ‘national tragedy’ and, again without precedent in recent decades, many commentators including our Governor General agreed. Within the same year SBS screened Julia Black’s controversial documentary My Foetus; there was a debate about abortion and family values at time of the Federal election; various new forums, groups and publications have appeared questioning the abortion consensus; a series of Questions on Notice by several politicians have elicited new information on the abortion scene; and several pieces of new research have appeared on Australian attitudes to abortion. All these things have kept abortion in public notice for the past year or so. It was as if this was a debate we had to have and despite the best efforts of pro-abortion ideologues to assert that the issues were settled a generation ago, the debate has proven very difficult to close down. Australians remain seriously interested in this question and willing to engage in what is one of great moral issues of our time.

There is, of course, nothing new about abortion. The numbers spiraled in Australia from the 1970s onwards. But after thirty years’ experience of effective abortion-on-demand and abortion rates amongst the highest in the Western world, the time seems ripe to query some of the assumptions upon which Australia’s uneasy compact was based. Until now the unspoken agreement was: turn a legal blind-eye to abortion; publicly fund it but rarely to talk about it in public; and never to come to terms with in private. But no more…

2. So what has changed?

A new generation of women (and men) has emerged with a very different agenda to that of the generation which fought for (and against) the abortion spiral of the 1970s and ’80s. As one of the young women who spoke at a recent Women’s Forum Australia gathering in Sydney said, “The abortion issue was debated and decided before my generation was born…Those of my age group haven’t had the opportunity publicly to discuss the kinds of policies and approaches we would like to see implemented.” Most of the 800 women who attended that meeting were less than 40 years of age; so were all 800 or so Sydney University students who attended a lunch time debate on abortion last September. Clearly young people do not think that abortion policy is a no-go area, something which was resolved long ago by their olders and betters, which is now ‘none of their business’.

Another new factor is the technological revolution which has taken ultrasound imaging right into the womb, allowing people to see an unborn for the human being he is and to bond earlier to that child. The same technological revolution has unraveled DNA, so that no-one who has done Year 8 Science believes that the early human organism is just a clump of the mother’s tissue or a vegetable waiting for a soul. And the more we know about the science of the unborn the greater community disgust at abortion, especially those late term abortions which sadly have become a specialty of this city at the hands of Australia’s most notorious abortionist, Dr David Grundmann.

Of course there are plenty of philosophical rationales on offer out there for treating very young human beings as ‘non-persons’ or ‘rightless persons’. Some cut the deck at birth, or some at an earlier stage. But to each such attempt to justify abortion or other attacks on the unborn by defining them out of the class of protected persons, we might ask: what is the unborn child before it is morally human? What makes the unborn child suddenly become human? Ask any grieving mother of a still-born child or who has had a miscarriage whether it was a child that has died. Try telling her it was “a pre-personal organism of doubtful moral status”. What Feminist writer Naomi Wolff called this “the fœtus as nothing paradigm” is no longer intellectually or emotionally tenable for most people. Recent research (about which we will hear more later in this conference) demonstrates that the ‘foetus isn’t a human person’ line just does not persuade most Australians anymore, if ever it did.

Another philosophical challenge to the old abortion consensus has been the issue of what standard of personhood we can invent which excludes unborns from personhood (or protection) but which can resist excluding various other unwanted people from the class of persons or protected persons. Whatever characteristic is chosen by which to exclude the unborn—such as independence, rationality, wantedness or responsiveness—quickly threatens the lives of other, born people. Indeed the unborn, especially in the weeks before birth, sometimes demonstrate more of these characteristics than some born people. Philosophically such lines reduce to mere arbitrariness and it is evidence that whatever the characteristic(s) we value in human beings they only ever demonstrate it because they already have a human nature.

Apart from generational change and developments in science and philosophy, our religious climate have also developed. A lasting legacy of Pope John Paul II will undoubtedly be his having positioned Catholicism as a defender of the unborn and a builder of an alternative civilisation of life and love to that of the “culture of death”. Catholics are not alone in this struggle. Evangelical churches and other major world religions are increasingly outspoken in their pro-life beliefs. It is, in fact, only the more pro-life churches and religions that are growing anymore, while the groupings of liberal, pro-abortion believers are in terminal decline. And the latest theological explorations—such as David Jones’ excellent book, The Soul of the Embryo—reveal a new generation amongst theologians and moralists more pro-life than many of its immediate predecessors.

Biology, philosophy and theology have given little comfort to the abortion ideologues in the past three decades: how about the women’s experience? The wholesale experience of abortion—touching perhaps 1 in 3 women directly, and through them everyone else—has meant there is an enormous emotional investment in keeping abortion available and non-judgmentalized. But, paradoxically, the abortion experience has left so many women (and men) hurting that the old ‘abortion is safe and easy’ line just doesn’t wash with people any more. There is too much suffering, too much silence. The shocking lack of aftercare for these women matches the disturbing lack of pre-abortion information and option-giving. Increasingly stories are emerging and studies following of the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual ill-effects of the abortion revolution. (Much more will be said about all this later in this conference.)

Whatever the costs, abortion was supposed to win women freedom. Yet as Germain Greer has observed: “What women ‘won’ was the ‘right’ to undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the governments who would not support mothers, the employers who would not employ mothers, the landlords who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that would not accept students with children. Historically the only thing pro-abortion agitation achieved was to make an illiberal establishment look far more feminist than it was.” (The Whole Woman, Doubleday, 1999, p. 86)

The experience of over two million abortions here in Australia in the past two or three decades alone means that we can no longer pretend abortion is used as a last resort for a few women in grave difficulties such as danger to life or health or pregnancy after rape. It has, in fact, become a common place. The sexual revolution and abortion revolution which resulted from and supported it have proven to be a monumental failure in terms of the promises of more intimate and enduring relationships, every child being a wanted child, replacing war-making with love-making and many other aspirations of hippies, libertarians and others.

Instead our copulation explosion has been coupled with a population implosion. The imminent demographic disaster for the West—and the economic, political and cultural tensions it will occasion—rather like the water disaster here in Australia, has occasioned occasional expressions of concern by leaders, commentaries in the press, but little real action in response. We are in denial: but reality is fast forcing itself upon us.

The political scene is at last catching up with this. Political correctness once helped keep the code of silence on abortion, but it is falling out of favour. The advent of ‘family values’  and family friendly political parties and platforms has meant more leading politicians are now more willing to take an openly pro-life stand or at least ask the hard questions about abortion than there have been for two or three decades. As the Democrats in the United States are discovering to their peril, anti-life, anti-family parties will have a smaller next generation of supporters; pro-life, pro-family parties are likely to have a larger next generation of supporters even without converting any new people to their cause. Life is hereditary!

All these recent factors and more mean that the ‘social compact’ to turn a blind eye to abortion or keep silent about its social and personal costs seems to be crumbling. The continuing deep ambivalence, unease, even hostility towards abortion is now surfacing in various forums. It is a debate we have to have.

3. Challenges for pro-lifers

For all this we should not expect that the new abortion debate will be an easy one. There are challenges we must face such as:
 social and individual habit: we are well used to abortion, on a large  scale an readily available; it is now regarded as a ‘right’, even if its exercise is seen more as a necessary evil than a positive good; many women have already exercised this supposed right; so it will be a hard habit for our community to break
 corruption of institutions: many of our institutions, such as the medical, legal and political professions and sections of the women’s movement, commerce and government bureaucracy, have been deeply compromised by three decades of complicity in abortion; they are not likely to reform selves overnight
 abortifacient ideologies: the tyranny of moral relativism (pace Pope Benedict XVI), the cult of individualistic autonomy and the power of pragmatism in a results-driven world have all corrupted consciences; the recent debate over the moral respectability of torture is evidence of just how morally insensitive we have become
 new technologies of abortion: such as RU486, deregulated ‘MAP’ and contraception more generally have led and will lead to a radical increase in the variety and quantity of abortions, at all stages of gestation, and the blurring of the line between genuine contraception and genuine abortion
 the ugliness of abortion: the psychology of abortion permissiveness means that the very ugliness of abortion, far from playing into the hands of pro-lifers, often serves to silence discussion; to stop abortion requires confronting what it is and we do not like to confront such ugly things, we do not even want to think of them; confronting people, especially people who have been connected with abortion in some way, with the ugliness of it makes them wither flee or fight, neither of may be very useful
 the violence of abortion: which again might be thought to play into our hands of pro-lifers (because, once exposed, it would surely be opposed by all right thinking people) can actually play into the hands of abortion proponents; having just been through the bloodiest century in history, we have become desensitized to violence in the community, the home and the womb; for all the talk about child abuse and domestic violence, our moral outrage has been blunted to the most common forms of these evils, abortion, and indeed to many other forms of violence
 the elitism of abortion proponents: the abortion industry says life is only for the privileged and perfect; while, once again, this elitism might be thought to play into pro-life hands in an egalitarian societies such as ours, it reflects a eugenics mentality that is alive and well in our community, as recent survey evidence on attitudes to genetic abortion highlights
 the power of the abortion industry: any attempts to reopen the abortion debate will be resisted by powerful interests in the abortion industry; as Germain Greer has observed, “The pharmaceutical multi-nationals will not allow any wholesale revision of abortion rights, in case the mode of operation of their so-called contraceptives should be called in question” (The Whole Woman, Doubleday, 1999, p. 88).

4. New Opportunities

Despite these challenges the new abortion debate reflects many new opportunities. Some women are beginning privately to acknowledge and publicly to speak out about, the harm and heartache that is involved in abortion—as we will hear later in this conference. Most Australians clearly want something done to reduce the incidence of abortion—as we will also hear later. This is possibly an early sign of moral awakening about what abortion involves: for in recognizing the harms abortion occasions for the perpetrators, by-standers and promoters we may be coming to see the harm it does to its principal victims.

No-one seems to think abortion is a good thing, even if many think it should be an option. The deafening silence of the abortion industry at today’s debate suggests that it is finding it increasingly difficult to convince the public that abortion is a good thing, good for women, good for families, good for society, and good for unwanted children. So the abortion industry either refuses to engage (why risk losing even more ground) or increasingly resorts to shrill emotionalism and horror stories (something we must resist imitating).

When we acknowledge what abortion is this is certainly a debate we have to have. We cannot continue to kill our next generation and maim our womenfolk, to mess up our family life and sterilize our community so that it is not even replacing itself, without asking: is this a good thing to be doing? We cannot continue denying the infertile any opportunity to adopt and denying would-be grandparents any opportunity to grandparent, without wondering why. We cannot keep undermining our medical ethics and professional practice and imagine this will be without ill-results in other areas of healthcare as well. So the debate is not pointless, even when we feel we are shadow-boxing. There are things that need to be said, loud and clear. And there are things that need to be done.

5. What do we need to say?

We need to keep saying that the unborn child from conception to birth is a human being, a member of the human family, our little brother or sister. Three decades of pro-life work seems to have worked here. For all the best efforts of a much better resourced abortion industry and its friends, the community is still not convinced by the foetus-ain’t-a-person-line, and indeed they are less and less convinced.

Secondly, we need to challenge the culture of choice, as if all that matters in life is getting our own way, at whatever cost to ourselves and others. Having conquered the communist separation of common good from freedom, John Paul II’s great project for the Western World was to challenge the consumerist separation of freedom from truth. Ironically, even as we question dogma of autonomy-trumping-all, we can benefit from its ascendancy by pressing that what we want for women is that they not be railroaded into abortion. It is in fact the pro-life side of this debate who want women to be given real choices. And who can be against giving women choices? Surely not the femocrat and liberal establishments which have built their power-bases on that very rhetoric.

Thirdly, we must question the widespread notion of abortion as a necessary evil, as something we have just got to wear in hard cases. The harm minimization mentality sells us a low view of human possibilities (even under divine grace) and encourages us to think that women, their partners and their doctors cannot be expected to do right thing. We still have to be ready, too, with answers to the old chestnuts about abortion to save the mother’s life, to save the child from life, to save the women’s health, in the case of rape or incest—even if we now know these are very rare. We have to offer society an alternative vision to that which says “abortion is evil, sure, but a necessary evil,” paint for people an inspiring yet realistic alterative of a world where abortion is rare and increasingly unthinkable. We can surely offer people a better account of the good life, one that appeals to the gifts and strengths of women (and men) and enables them to ‘take control’ of their lives not by robbing anyone else of life but by a gift of themselves that is ultimately life-giving for them also.

6. What do we need to do?

We must keep opening cracks in the smug ’70s-’80s consensus on abortion, even if major legal or institutional change are still some way off.

We need to provide real alternatives to abortion. From three decades of experience in pro-life battle and all the recent research, I am convinced that this is how we will best save babies and mothers from the jaws of the abortion beast: by giving them a way out. Women who are pregnant in difficult circumstances need more choices, not fewer, and they need choices which do not demand that they decide between their own life-story and that of their child. When the Adelaide Women and Children’s Hospital introduced mandatory independent counselling before abortion, they saw a 25% reduction in abortion numbers (Adelaide’s Sunday Mail, 25 July 2004) prompting calls by the abortion industry to ban independent counselling and by others to ensure both independent information and options-giving and independent counselling be much more freely available.

Sadly the Federal government has for years spent ten times as much on counselling by abortion providers as it has spent on pro-life pregnancy counselling services. If we are to help women who think pregnancy is death to their planned life-story not only to revise their proposed life-story but also be less afraid of the change, then we need to ensure than pregnancy and child-birth are not the end for women seeking an education or building a career or other reasonable goals. Of course their goals may well change after having a child and perhaps should change, but there will be no chance for such change if the baby is killed as an act of self-defence of economic security, study plans and professional hopes. This raises big questions regarding maternity and paternity leave, educational and workplace practices, childcare, tax structures and other social policies that need to be much more family friendly.

We need also to encourage and empower men to take their part in supporting pregnant women. Many feel impotent to contribute either to social debate or individual decisions, even when they are the father. Many men evade commitment, responsibility or sacrifice—they are afraid of growing up. We must help them recover a sense of manhood and ideals of fatherhood, in place of recreationalisation of sex and so of women and ultimately of themselves, and in the face of the emasculation of men which has gone on over the past few decades, leaving them the ‘enemy’, the carriers of that worst of sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, the ones who ‘get women pregnant’. By recovering a love of their bodies and their fathering potential, and regaining a sense of place of sex within committed marital love, both men and women are liberated to say what they mean and mean what they say by sex.

We must also question the easy harm minimizationist response of well-meaning people such as the Governor-General, as well as the more sinister ideologues and commercial interests, who keep telling us that the answer to abortion is more sex education and access to contraception. We have tried this very panacea for three decades now and it has manifestly failed. More value-free sex education and easier access to contraception has meant higher and earlier rates of sexual activity, higher rates of pregnancy and higher rates of abortion. The 2003 Sex in Australia survey found there are already high levels of contraceptive knowledge and use amongst those who have abortions; indeed we now know that most abortions occur amongst people who are already contracepting. No wonder the abortion industry is quite happy to promote contraception and contraceptive-abortion hybrids such as the morning-after pill: far from being contraception, these practices help feed the industry.

Last of all, we need to get much smarter about our messaging: what we say, where, how, in whose voice, in this area. We need to do and to build on sound research into social attitudes and into what approaches work, and be willing to let go of well-worn strategies or long-habituated ways of pro-life thinking and acting if they do not match the reality of where people are today and what will work with them. This does not mean abandoning moral principles, selling out for quick popularity or to save a few. It does mean reading the signs of the times and bringing our ancient principles and contemporary prudence to bear upon the real challenges and opportunities of these times.

7. The debate goes on

The new abortion debate is NOT the old abortion debate dressed up in new clothes, even if there are some perennial issues. We are a very different society to that which in the 1970s and ’80s embraced the abortion revolution in the wake of sexual and consumer revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s.

The new abortion debate reveals deep chasms in our culture and what some US commentators have called ‘the culture wars’ about the most fundamental questions such as the meaning of life, the nature of the human person and community, and the place of love, freedom and self-sacrifice in a life, the kind of civilisation we are building and bequeathing to our children and indeed whether there will be any children to bequeath our civilisation to. As the Catholic Bishops of Australia said last November: “Every human being deserves our reverence and love, from the beginning to the end of the continuum of life. All human rights ultimately depend upon that recognition. But respect for human dignity also requires practical support for vulnerable people. We need to build a culture that respects the link between life and love, welcomes and esteems children and families, and supports women in every way.” This debate goes not just to the heart of some life-and-death decisions about particular children and their mothers, but also to the very heart of our civilisation and culture. And that means we have all the more reason to resist those who would like to shut down the abortion debate. We have to keep the embers of the Australian conscience aflame.

Even if there is not yet and may never be community consensus about abortion, continuing debate is crucial and it is, as the absence of my opponent today demonstrates, deeply subversive of the old compact of silence. We must keep creating opportunities for Australians to talk about abortion and what can be done about it. I commend the organizers of today’s forum and this ‘debate’ for doing just that.