Imagine I am sitting next to you at one of those before-work “breakfast celebration” events for International Women’s Day. You know the ones, coffee, morning scrolls, large conference venue, same carpet in each.
We’ve just been asked to turn the person next to us to introduce ourselves: say our name, and something that we like using the first letter of our name. We’ve been here before.
I would say: my name is Anna, and I like autonomy.
Not just any old autonomy.
I like the autonomy to choose who I have sex with, how often, and what this means for my uterus.
I like the autonomy that rejects centuries of pro-natalist patriarchal essentialising of all pregnancy-capable people “of reproductive age” as wombs or wombs-to-be.
I like the autonomy that allows all people with uteruses to live our best lives.
I like the fact that 30 years ago, it was agreed globally, that sexual and reproductive health and rights means that bodily autonomy, sexual pleasure and pregnancy can co-exist, separately, if we want or need them to.
Which brings me to another A word.
One that still today is spoken in hushed tones amongst only the most trusted of friends, one that is too often referred to using other ‘gentler’ acronyms or other words by health professionals. One that it’s mere mention has conservative protesters running for their placards and politicians running for the hills.
That A word is abortion.
And I like abortion because abortion is the key to autonomy.
Yes of course, it’s not the only key. But without access to abortion, autonomy quickly slips out of our collective grasp.
Here’s why.
Abortion is common. It is estimated that 73 million abortions occur globally every year.
Abortion can happen safely in clinical settings and outside them. It is safe, effective and instrumental in promoting the wellbeing of pregnant people who do not want or cannot have a baby.
Yet it remains shrouded in secrecy. In Australia, there is no routinely collected national data about the number of abortions that take place, what type of abortion and who provides or needs them.
The most recent estimates we have are from 2017-2018 – a time where abortion was still illegal in some states and territories. Based on independent analysis of MBS and PBS data by University researchers, it was estimated that approximately 88,000 abortions occur in this country every year.
What these figures don’t tell us is how many people in Australia wanted an abortion and couldn’t get one.
Despite now being legal in all states and territories, abortion is not publicly available in Australia’s otherwise celebrated universal public health system.
If you live in NSW and turn up to any of the 220-odd public hospitals and request a surgical abortion, you are likely to be turned away (thank you Wagga Wagga and Hunter New England Hospitals for bucking that trend). Heaven forbid you turn up to a Catholic hospital.
You can, in theory, obtain abortion care legally in the primary healthcare system in Australia.
That is, if you are willing and able to undertake (and pay for) a gauntlet of tasks, from GP appointments, to bloodwork and ultrasounds, then either sourcing medication or a clinic with available timeslots, within reach, during their opening hours.
Unless of course, there is a medically indicated reason that the pregnancy is non-viable or not safe for your health. But you don’t get to decide that, a doctor does.
A big shout out to all the wonderful doctors out there who provide abortion care in the face of obstruction by their peers and profession.
Who else gets to decide? Well, as it happens, politicians do too.
Australia’s heavy ban on the now widely-used abortifacient mifepristone (also known as RU486) until 2012 was part of a deal made by the 1990s Australian Government with one social conservative politician to get their proposed sale of Telstra over the line.
That is right. Reproductive autonomy of people in Australia was traded for a business deal.
We are not alone.
On February 8 this year – just one month ago – USA President Joe Biden stated that despite lamenting the overturning of legislation protecting the rights to abortion in the USA, he is still a good Catholic man and doesn’t want to see “abortion on demand”.
He’s vying for re-election, remember.
But to pause for a second, what’s so wrong with abortion on demand?
In many parts of the world and for many people, abortion is safer than giving birth.
Yet there are still those, including among the reproductive health and rights community in Australia who continue to position contraception as the literal antidote to abortion. If we, people with uteruses, got our contraception right, then we wouldn’t NEED abortion.
What if the circumstances of sex did not permit you to use it? What if you don’t like contraception or don’t want to use it or can’t afford to?
And what if, you were actually quite comfortable with having an abortion?
What if, making decisions about how to have sex involved an open acceptance that you might want or choose to have an abortion, and you are absolutely ok with that?
Isn’t that what we should be celebrating on this International Day for Women? The ability for all of us to make autonomous choices about our bodies that involve safe, effective processes that occur to at least a quarter of the population in our reproductive lives?
So why are we still whispering about it?
The silence from Australia’s politicians and from the medical system is overwhelmingly loud.
Don’t.
Talk.
About.
The A word.
Despite making promises in their 2019 election campaign to ensure public abortion was available for all, the current Labor government has barely uttered the word, not in its 2023 budget, not in Senate Estimates, and we are still waiting for its now long overdue response to its own Federal Senate Inquiry into Universal Reproductive Healthcare held last year.
Amelia Bonow, Founding Director of the 100K+ strong Shout Your Abortion social media movement said in a recent post ““we are all trained to talk about abortion as something that you should avoid at all costs, that you should only have an abortion if you absolutely can’t have a baby and if you were trying your best to avoid pregnancy”.
When she decided to ditch persevering with years of bleeding for weeks on end irrespective of which contraceptive she took, she realised that in fact abortion could be not just Plan B or C but plan A too.
She recalls telling a sexual partner at the time she made this decision to embrace her autonomy, “If I end up having an abortion it will probably make me a better feminist.”
Amelia’s job is to talk about abortion. All the time, everywhere. Because that is where abortion should be – in public discourse and in public health – available if, when and where it is needed or desired.
“If you like sex and don’t want a baby and you decide that it would be ok for you to have an abortion, I’m happy for you. If you want to avoid having an abortion, I totally get that and I am pulling for you”, Amelia says.
This is what celebrating autonomy looks like.
But until we, like Amelia, can collectively say the word abortion openly without a single gasp or raised eyebrow, we are still so far from celebration.
Because without abortion there is no autonomy, and there is certainly no feminism without autonomy.
My name is Anna and I like autonomy.
Happy International Women’s Day.