'Bad Old Days' As New Criterion For Abortion
INTERESTING new results from that Australian Longitudinal Study of Health and Relationships. The headline story is that the abortion rate in Australia is in decline. That's significant, even epochal - presented and discussed in the media, moreover, as very welcome news. And the arguments and allusions accompanying the findings are equally interesting, historically and culturally. Discussing the results, Dr Julia Shelley told the International Congress on Women's Mental Health in Melbourne yesterday that less than five per cent of women born in the 1980s have had an abortion - compared to 14 per cent for women 10 years older. "We've plotted a sudden decline in the abortion rate that is so low it harps (sic) right back to the time when abortion was illegal and rarely practised," Dr Shelley said. It was rarely practised? So the prohibitions of yore didn't cause a coat hanger-ridden horror story after all but kept the abortion rate low - which is, by common consent, a good thing. How did we get to a comparable point?
Dr Shelley notes the rate increased markedly after the legalisation of abortion, the "sexual revolution" and the advent of the pill. The latter factor seems counterintuitive but not in the broader context of the generalised liberality sanctioned by legalisation and by culture in the 1960s and 70s. The pill, after all, could only do so much. As though offsetting the backdown of referencing the past as a positive criterion for assessing the present, Dr Shelley explains the rate decrease with a hodge-podge of politically correct talking points: safe sex campaigns, sex education, increased use of condoms following AIDS and HIV etc. But these are precisely the things the "grandmothers" she mentions didn't have when they so "rarely" had recourse to abortion. There is, then, a 'have it all' feel to Dr Shelley's analysis and this could be used as a smart new abortion apologia: 'we're as pro-life as our foremothers but we're also free.' Or could the truth be that a revivified respect for nature is emerging against the crass utilitarianism of the past?
Dr Shelley notes the rate increased markedly after the legalisation of abortion, the "sexual revolution" and the advent of the pill. The latter factor seems counterintuitive but not in the broader context of the generalised liberality sanctioned by legalisation and by culture in the 1960s and 70s. The pill, after all, could only do so much. As though offsetting the backdown of referencing the past as a positive criterion for assessing the present, Dr Shelley explains the rate decrease with a hodge-podge of politically correct talking points: safe sex campaigns, sex education, increased use of condoms following AIDS and HIV etc. But these are precisely the things the "grandmothers" she mentions didn't have when they so "rarely" had recourse to abortion. There is, then, a 'have it all' feel to Dr Shelley's analysis and this could be used as a smart new abortion apologia: 'we're as pro-life as our foremothers but we're also free.' Or could the truth be that a revivified respect for nature is emerging against the crass utilitarianism of the past?
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