Abortion - Australian Family Party

In a recent Liberty Itch article on abortion, the clinching argument was that being pro-choice regarding the Covid vaccine made the pro-life position on abortion hypocritical. I disagree.

Although prioritising individual liberty, libertarians also recognise that there is a role for government in protecting individual rights and property. Abortion, which has impacts on the mother, father and unborn child, therefore falls well within the ambit of libertarian discussion.

The matter of vaccination is a largely personal one – doubly so when the vaccine has not undergone normal medical trials to establish safety and efficacy.

Governments chose to indemnify drug companies from any negative outcomes as a result of the use of their Covid vaccines, a move that was as irresponsible as it was outrageous. These decisions further strengthen the argument for personal choice and autonomy.

On the matter of abortion, women indeed have a choice. They can choose to abstain from sex, thus avoiding any pregnancy. Alternatively, they can use contraceptive measures to significantly reduce the likelihood of pregnancy. The argument that a woman’s right to kill her unborn child is ‘empowering’ equates to the use of abortion as a convenient post-conception contraceptive.

The utilitarian argument, using abortion to reduce poverty and suffering, is also unconvincing – summarised neatly in the statement that a woman “should have the right to remove it, just as someone has the right to remove a guest from their property”.

As any property owner knows, removing a squatter or tenant who refuses to pay rent is far from simple, as the law is at pains to protect those who may be vulnerable. Further, any owner who evicted a squatter, tenant or guest while knowing that eviction would lead to their immediate death would surely risk being charged with manslaughter, if not murder.

If the utilitarian position is a reasonable one, then throwing an unwanted pet out of a car in a snowstorm is also perfectly acceptable.

Unsurprisingly, and very fortunately, making anything a crime does attract government coercion. I may not agree with the law, but I do expect the government to enforce any law it passes. On the other hand, as we know all too well, banning something does not mean it does not occur.

The argument that “It is wrong to violate the bodily autonomy of one person to keep another alive” acknowledges that the unborn child is a person. The pro-choice position then seeks to justify the unborn child’s murder on the basis that it violated the ‘individual rights’ of the mother, whose rights outrank the unborn child’s life.

If we are to accept that the ‘rights’ of one individual trump the ‘rights’ or, more importantly, the life of another, then this suggests that a hierarchy of individuals can be established for all individuals in our society. It also means an unborn foetus has the same right to life as the woman in which it is located.

By the same logic, should we kill recidivists to supply life-saving organs to more worthy persons?

Pregnant women can, of course, avoid the impact and responsibility of raising a child by placing the baby up for adoption.

The pro-choice argument for bodily autonomy once the woman has become pregnant also doesn’t hold water.

Imagine a pilot who decides halfway through a flight that they no longer wish to be a pilot, or a surgeon who decides halfway through surgery that they no longer wish to operate.

As a society, we expect people charged with responsibilities to discharge those responsibilities with all due care. A pilot or surgeon is at liberty not to commence a flight or operation, and to cease performing those functions when it is safe to do so. In a similar vein, a pregnant woman is responsible for the safe care of her unborn child and should be obliged to fulfil those responsibilities until that child can be safely delivered to the care of others.

We can all agree that men and women should be able to choose whether or not to have a child, or whether or not to keep a child after birth. What I cannot agree with is ending a child’s life simply because it is convenient for the mother and/or father. Even if the child is conceived as a result of rape or incest, or due to contraceptive failure, convenience is not a sufficient reason.

In South Australia last year, a bill was introduced into the parliament requiring that women who choose to terminate a pregnancy after 28 weeks induce the child alive, not stillborn. After 28 weeks, with proper care, babies are viable outside the womb.

The bill did not prevent women from terminating their pregnancies, it only insisted that the baby be born alive, not euthanized and be born dead.

Presumably, as the woman was planning to abort the child, giving the child to a loving couple to adopt would not be opposed. This would have given rise to a significant number of new adoptions.

The bill was defeated 10 votes to 9 in South Australia’s Upper House.

As a woman’s ‘right to choose’ a termination was not being compromised, why anyone would oppose saving the life of the child when it was going to be aborted anyway is beyond me.

Our laws are distinctly uneven when it comes to the issue of abortion.

On the one hand, they allow mothers to decide the fate of the child without the father’s input. On the other, if the mother decides to continue with the pregnancy, despite the father wanting an abortion, then the father remains responsible for the provision of child support.

In this regard, the silence from pro-choice feminists is deafening.

Personally, I would argue that the entire pro-choice abortion argument is a hypocritical house of cards.

For example, in 2009, a bill called ‘Zoe’s Law’ was introduced into the NSW Parliament that aimed to recognize the death of an unborn child as a separate offence – particularly in cases where the loss of the foetus was caused by a criminal act against the mother.

Named after Zoe Donegan, an unborn child who died in 2009 after her mother, Brodie Donegan, was injured in a car accident caused by a reckless driver, the case sparked debate about whether the legal system adequately addressed the loss of an unborn child in such circumstances.

The bill was eventually watered down and became the ‘Crimes Legislation Amendment (Loss of Foetus) Act 2021’ and is now the operative law in New South Wales for addressing the loss of an unborn child due to criminal acts.

Finally, our society prosecutes people for damaging the eggs of endangered eagles or nesting sites while celebrating human abortions, all while human birth rates continue to fall below replacement rates.

Thank you for your support.

Guest Writer Timothy Lynch

Heinrich Heine’s ominous line, “Those who burn books will in the end burn people,” is one of the most quoted in modern history. It appears in his 1821 play, Almansor.

While it has become a leitmotif of Holocaust remembrance – the sentence is engraved at Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the Nazi book burning of 1933 – Heine was actually describing the burning of Korans by Christians in late 15th-century Granada.

There is a certain irony in the contemporary Islamist zeal to burn books that offend the Prophet. Heine, a German Jew, was warning all of us that absolutist positions have murderous consequences.

The British House of Commons has missed the irony. In 1967, its MPs gave us abortion on demand; last week, it did the same with euthanasia. The move from withdrawing the right to life from the youngest to the oldest was not linear. But, as in Australia, it was perhaps inevitable.

Pressuring your old granny to shuffle off this mortal coil now has the veneer of choice. It is a chosen “death with dignity” that drives the voluntary assisted dying camp. There is dignity in abortion, too, we are often told. But dignity invites exploitation, and choices are subject to pressure. Abortion may have been safe (save for its target) and legal. It has not become rare. What will stop euthanasia being subject to the same forces?

Big Abortion will find its companion in Big Euthanasia. Scientists will devise more efficient (and thus “more dignified”) death pods. Medical insurers will offer discounts to check out early. Parties of the left will seek to clothe reproductive rights and assisted dying in the same moral superiority. All the time we will be asked to celebrate the primacy of choice.

The US offers some lessons here. Unlike Britain, Europe and nearly all of Australia, Americans have not embraced VAD; it is legal in only 10 states. But at abortion they are world leaders. Since the US Supreme Court removed most protections of unborn children (in Roe v Wade, 1973), more than 60 million have been aborted – an average of more than a million a year. There were more abortions last year, the year after Roe was repealed, than in the year before it. Blue states such as New York and California have the most liberal abortion regimes in the world.

Democrats celebrated the procedure at their convention in Chicago this year. It was the one issue on which Kamala Harris spoke with fluency and conviction (if not electoral gain).

Two in every five abortions in the US are of a child of colour. African-American women comprise less than 8 per cent of the US population but in 2021 accounted for 42 per cent of all terminations.

The Democratic Party has been complicit in reducing its own voter base; non-Hispanic black women are its most reliable constituency and the demographic most depleted by abortion. If there is such a thing as structural racism and white supremacy, abortion might be their greatest exemplar.

Economic disadvantage (say liberals) and family breakdown (say conservatives) are cited as the causes of this disparity. Ideology aside, it is hard to ignore the ubiquity of a reproductive right that its original framers claimed would be used hardly at all.

Sound familiar? Euthanasia will be safe, legal and rare. Most British MPs pushed this line last week. We heard similar from our legislators when assisted dying was legalised in every Australian state between 2017 and last year. Only the territories have held out; the ACT will offer the procedure from next year. Access to assisted suicide, they all said, would absolutely not become a tool of population control or of political economy: “We would never put National Health Service/Medicare budgets before the right to life.” But the expansion of legal abortion since the early 1970s suggests otherwise.

An entire industry inevitably will develop around the right to die, as it has the right to abort. Euthanasia, like abortion, will be offered for more reasons rather than fewer. Bone cancer (one of the worst ways to die) is now grounds for the state to assist in your suicide. Will severe depression or gender dysphoria eventually trigger this assistance too? History suggests they will. My best friend of 50 years has clubfoot. Aborting him for this would have appalled some pro-choice activists in 1967. But this is now a routine reason to terminate a pregnancy. Why should we suppose euthanasia is immune to the same slippage?

Families across Britain, as we have seen in Europe and increasingly in Australia, will start to think about assisted dying as one of the several options that getting old presents. Just as abortion is now euphemised and celebrated as healthcare, assisted dying will become part of elder care.

Covid was not an advert for state government protection of care home residents. Are we confident they would hold the line when more permissive assisted dying policies are proposed?

A loving family will, of course, want to end the suffering of a loved one. My mum and dad are 85 and 86. There are few days when I do not contemplate how they will die and the role the NHS will play. Passage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in England may offer us some sort of additional option. But what about the families animated by greed or laziness?

Vested interests, as with the abortion industry, will make access to assisted dying easier and imbue it with moral virtue: “Your dying will help fight climate change.” The pressure on an ailing relative to “let go” will increase. The weakest and most vulnerable members of any society (after children in the womb) will be afforded, across time, fewer and fewer protections. All the while we will be told of the golden age of dignity and choice now upon us.

You start by aborting babies, you end by gassing grandma.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

This article first appeared in The Australian on 5 December, 2024.