Abortion Distortions

But we should not overdramatise the dangers of going underground. Historically the so-called "backyard" usually was, and would be again, the "backroom" of a qualified doctor's surgery. Past Director of Planned Parenthood, Dr Mary Calderone, admitted in the American Journal of Public Health that even in the illegal 60s in America, with its ghettoes of black and Hispanic poverty, 90 per cent of all "backyard" abortions were in fact carried out by trained physicians. In Australia any covert abortions could simply be reclassified as "curettes" and done on Medicare in the "backroom" of a colluding doctor's surgery. Or alternatively, done by experienced amateurs using the cheap sterile suction pump seen on the My Foetus film. In these covert but clean circumstances, and with routine backup at casualty, the immediate physical risk of illegal abortion would be very ordinary.

I say "immediate physical" risk, because there are other profound injuries, moral and emotional, sustained in creating a place of death in one's own body, which are far from ordinary. Delayed risks such as breast cancer are not yet well defined. But here the discussion is of death by coat hangers, not the deathly effects of abortion upon the inner life of the mother.

Enforcing genuine limits on abortion does not place women at any dramatic physical risk, because medicine has minimised that risk; it might drive a few women to a safe and secret backroom, but not to the propagandist's ”backyard”, nor to his anachronistic "coat hanger".

The current alternative is to have no limits, to permit the wholesale slaughter of unwanted unborn children - "children", as writer Bob Ellis put it, "who would have loved you" - and the wholesale scarring of mothers' and fathers' hearts, which might lose the capacity to love at all.