Leading up to the film showing, the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, and other dailies ran a flurry of news articles, film reviews, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor reflecting both anti-abortion and pro-choice views. The question of abortion was also featured on ABC’s Radio National and the television program Lateline.

In an August 5 piece in the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Abortion is science’s grim story,” columnist Miranda Devine repeated one of the main false arguments peddled by opponents of women’s right to abortion: “that foetuses are humans cannot be denied, thanks to technology.” Devine claimed to be exposing “the lie so long at the heart of the abortion debate—that it is not about killing the smallest humans.”

In a response in the August 7 Herald, titled “Women are more than wombs,” Adele Horin wrote, “The debate whipped up by the BBC documentary My Foetus has given the anti-abortion lobby oxygen to re-ignite old campaigns… It is putting the focus on the foetus. But it is important never to lose sight of the woman, and her circumstances, at the core of the abortion issue.”

Horin said, “Forced motherhood should not be the punishment for failed contraception or a contraceptive lapse, or for being human. Women are more than their wombs. And the state can’t tell them what to do with their bodies. It can’t force them to have a child they don’t want.”

Anti-abortion rights forces have used the film showing to advance their campaign, with federal health minister Anthony Abbott of the Liberal Party leading the charge. Abbott is well-known for his anti-choice stance. In a speech at Adelaide University last March, students booed him when he called the rate of abortions performed in Australia a “national tragedy.” Some chanted, “Get your morals off our bodies!”

“An objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience,” Abbott told students. In the current debate, he suggested further attacks on the right to abortion, saying that “a political constituency may even be starting to emerge to ban abortions after 20 weeks.”

Black, who asserts that she is still pro-choice and that she had an abortion at 21, says she made the film while pregnant. In the publicity leading up to the film’s airing here she said, “As my pregnancy progressed I began to question my views on abortion.” She added, “In the past I had always dismissed the anti-abortion movement as extremist. But I could no longer do that. I needed to listen to what they had to say because, if I had sworn allegiance to the pro-choice movement without question, then perhaps others had too.”

Claiming that the “secrecy around abortion had to be lifted,” Black’s film shows an abortion performed by manual vacuum aspiration on a woman at four weeks’ pregnancy. It also includes images of aborted foetuses that are 10, 11, and 21 weeks old and states, “However shocking, repulsive and confrontational they are, they represent the reality.”

The camera lingers on the image of the 21-week-old aborted fetus, then moves to Black’s very pregnant belly, and then to her three-dimensional ultrasound at 34 weeks’ pregnancy. In the voiceover, as these images appear, the filmmaker says, “It looks like a baby.” What the sequence suggests is that abortion, particularly late-term abortion, is murder.

Black says, “I challenge the pro-choice movement to help me and others resolve the emotional contradiction that surrounds abortion when you look at the facts.” Black’s film, however, leaves out the facts concerning the lives of women and their right to control their bodies, which is central to their ability to participate fully in society.

In Australia, one in three women will make the choice to have an abortion in her lifetime. Of the more than 70,000 abortions performed each year, 95 percent are performed in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

The Women’s Abortion Action Campaign in Sydney, which defends the right to choose, is sponsoring an October 13 public meeting on this subject at University of Technology in Sydney.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home