When I carelessly got pregnant at the age of twenty-nine, I sought an abortion. My Sydney GP of ten years’ standing, whom I trusted, cautioned against this course of action. So many of her patients struggled to get pregnant, she explained. ‘Clearly not an issue for me,’ I pointed out, and got my referral to the relevant clinic. Two weeks later, after enduring a second compulsory psychological assessment and handing over a few hundred dollars, I was no longer pregnant. That process was more cumbersome than I would have liked. But it was possible. Importantly, it was safe.
Five years later, when a baby I was carrying had died by eleven weeks, I was provided with medication to induce a miscarriage. Complications meant that I needed surgery, just as twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman, in the US state of Georgia, recently required. At Box Hill Hospital in Melbourne, I was turned away one day and, on the next, waited an uncomfortable length of time. But once again the process was safe and I was fine.
Thurman, by contrast, spent twenty hours in increasing and then agonising pain as sepsis took hold. Doctors administered antibiotics and IV fluid, but delayed the required dilation and curettage (‘D&C’). They feared contravening a new felony law that could see them spend up to ten years in prison. By the time they decided the emergency met the threshold for the few exceptions to the law’s ban, it was too late. Thurman died, leaving behind a six year-old child.
Safe reproduction, or to put it another way, good medical care for pregnant people, is possible in Australia only because of well over a century of women’s activism. Although abortion has been available in Australian states for decades now, it still took immense public pressure to decriminalise it: between 2019 and 2023, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia finally passed the necessary laws.
This month, so-called right to-life advocates in South Australia have brought a bill to prevent the termination of a pregnancy once the foetus is past twenty-eight weeks – as if anyone would make such a decision frivolously.
While the South Australia bill will go nowhere because of the composition of the current legislature, that is not the case in the United States. Donald Trump rose to the US presidency in 2017 on the back of a promise to make abortion illegal. He bragged during the 2024 campaign about his success in doing just that: appointing enough conservative judges to the Supreme Court to tilt the balance. His disdain for women in general is lifelong and all too evident.
It is not just rights to medical care that are under threat. In a recent ‘virtual rally’, Vice President Kamala Harris sat with Oprah Winfrey, in a studio in swing state Michigan. A parade of Hollywood celebrities appeared on screens that ringed a live audience, among whom were individuals and families who testified movingly about the rising cost of living, gun violence in schools, and abortion bans, including Amber Thurman’s family.
Meryl Streep asked Harris the final question: what would Harris do to prevent Trump or his allies and followers from wreaking havoc if she were to win the presidential election? In her reply, Harris noted that the aim of those who foment fear of ‘another Jan 6’ is to suppress voting. If voters feel that electoral votes will never be certified and/or counted in Congress, perhaps they need not bother casting a ballot. Harris finished her response with a line that gets to the heart of why this election matters so much to people worldwide: ‘We are going to fight for the integrity of the people’s voice and for our democracy.’
The right to vote is precious, as are all our rights. They are not natural, they can be wound back, and they must be protected. Women and gender-diverse people know this perhaps better than cis men; people of colour more readily than white people; Indigenous people in Australia more than settlers. When one belongs to a group that has had to fight for that right rather than to assume it is somehow natural and proper, the necessity of guarding it is clear.
Democracy in the United States is far from perfect. Its electoral processes, lacking independent oversight, are often dismal. And yet, what happens to democracy there is of clear global significance, not least because the rights-based mass social movements of the twentieth century, for all their shortcomings, are nothing less than iconic. For many Australians, this election patently feels personal; we are responding with an intensity arising from the long affinity between the two nations since settler-colonisation took place – shared language and deep, ongoing political and cultural exchange.
Project 2025, the thousand-page manifesto that would guide a second Trump administration, aims to ‘restore’ a United States of nuclear, straight families, where women raise children – lots of children. It lays out policies that Trump has endorsed and that will continue the work of his 2017-21 administration, such as undercutting the public service, especially the Departments of Education and Justice. This work will be enhanced by the recent Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which moves expertise and authority away from public agencies and vests it in the courts, where Trump, if re-elected, will do all he can to stack the benches, just as he did in his first term. Project 2025’s goal is nothing less than to entrench massive inequality and accelerate progress toward a nation ruled by oligarchs.
If Trump is re-elected, Americans will have taken the path of replacing popular sovereignty with a sovereign authority. For now that is vested in one man, but MAGA-infused successors such as pro-natalist J.D. Vance, backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, are nipping at his heels. The erosion of Americans’ rights – to abortion, education, a fair go, and so much else – opens the door ever wider for authoritarianism and fascism.
Novelist Sinclair Lewis, writing of the heartland of ‘America First’ territory in the 1930s, parodied his compatriots’ complacency about fascism in the book he titled It Can’t Happen Here. In fact, it can happen there.
In Australia, where populist politics around refugee policy and Indigenous people’s power have been extremely successful for those seeking elected office, it is no wonder people are watching the US election closely. It can happen here, too.
This is an extract from commentary piece ‘Can’t get enough of the US election?’ published today in the November issue of Australian Book Review.