It’s odd that Australia and New Zealand express their relative social liberalism in such different ways. In Australia’s State of Victoria, its State Parliament has just decriminalised abortion altogether- whereas here, it’s LGBT reform that has been ascendant. So, why are our respective countries different?
In Australia, there is no federal constraint on abortion access. Most states and territories have partial decriminalisation frameworks or judicial decisions that permit women liberal abortion access, partially due to its divergent religious and political history from our own. In the fifties, the Catholic Right’s National Civic Council split the Australian Labor Party over spurious claims of anti-communism, thus diverting an entire generation of aspirant, upwardly mobile working class youth from the Catholic Church, and weakening it over its ability to combat abortion access liberalisation. Even better for their pro-choice movement, Australian anti-abortionists proved prone to factionalism from an early stage. By contrast, it has been LGBT reform that has been long, drawn out, and subject to roadblocks in the context of civil unions and same-sex marriage recently.
In New Zealand, things were very different. SPUC (Voice for Life) marked the highwater mark of a particular conservative Catholic cohort in the seventies and early eighties, and coincided with the social conservative extremist Muldoon administration. In 1983, the Court of Appeal handed down Wall v Livingstone, sharply curtailing the powers of the Abortion Supervisory Committee over removal of certifying consultants, and locking interfering anti-abortionists out of specific cases of abortion. Over the last twenty five years, that has been the law of the land.
By contrast with the United States, abortion has become a mostly quiescent issue, apart from the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, still defending a woman’s right to choose, and their Christian Right opponents, Voice for Life (SPUC) and Right to Life New Zealand. Under the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act 1977, abortion is only partially decriminalised here. Liberal abortion access practice is trailed considerably by moribund legislation from the distant past. While male homosexuality and sex work have been decriminalised, abortion remains only partially decriminalised. Paradoxically, it is our LGBT communities who have become the benchmark of social liberalism.
It’s time that New Zealand followed Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and Canada. Women are obviously ethically mature enough to know what to do with their own bodies in the context of unwanted pregnancy.
Decriminalise abortion in New Zealand now.
Recommended:
ALRANZ: http://www.alranz.org
4 responses so far ↓
1 libhomo // Oct 13, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Criminalizing a perfectly legitimate medical procedure like abortion is crazy. It is an example of the foolish and destructive nature of religious extremism.
2 Craig Young // Oct 13, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Meanwhile, Gordon Copeland (Kiwi Party) is whingeing about conscience votes and the Labour Party. With the solitary exception of Harry Duynhoven, most “Labour” social conservatives have tended to desert the party if it dares to stand up for social justice outside the confines of sectarian religious dogma.
If the Labour Party is now predominantly socially liberal, it is the fault of social conservatives for placing sectarian ideology above party loyalty and social justice. They have only themselves to blame.
3 Craig Young // Oct 13, 2008 at 12:51 pm
In New Zealand, ALRANZ welcomed the advent of abortion law reform in Victoria, hoping that it would assist matters in our own neck of the woods. Right to Life whined about it, conveniently forgetting the role of conservative organised religion in the Southern United States and Nazi Germany in maintaining slavery and leading to the Nazi Holocaust.
Elderly misogynist Ken Orr seems to have conveniently forgotten that the Nazis *banned* abortion and homosexuality- in contemporary Christian Right newspeak, they were “pro-life” (sic) and “pro-
family” (except for German and European Jews and gypsies, and the five thousand gay victims of the Holocaust).
C.
4 Craig Young // Oct 15, 2008 at 10:29 am
Today, there was an extraordinary outburst from the elderly Mr Orr, who said that ALRANZ was a tiny organisation, and he didn’t see why the media sought comment from it. It’s called accuracy, balance, objectivity and neutrality, Mr Orr, and it is the benchmark of responsible investigative journalism to undertake critical inquiry.
Orr spluttered that ALRANZ supports decriminalisation of abortion. It argues that it doesn’t believe in embryonic and fetal protection, and then made some ridiculous remarks about the junk science construct known as ‘post-abortion
syndrome.’ The state has the right to force anti-abortion views on people, he added. Not unless it’s a theocracy, it doesn’t.
How utterly ridiculous. It is RTLNZ which is the unrepresentative organisation, largely limited to Christchurch as it is, as well as the product of a split with Voice for Life (SPUC) over RTLNZ’s prohibitionist anti-abortion stance in 1990.
If RTLNZ ever succeeds in its sinister objectives, the outcome will be the deaths of impoverished and desperate women from the ravages of backstreet abortion. It must never be allowed to fulfill those malignant aspirations.
C.
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