Women's Rights & Abortion in QLD - 1899 or 2009?

2012  REVIEWING THE LAST 3 YEARS AND THE UNNECESSARY ONGOING BURDEN OF BIOLOGY, PATRIARCHAL POWER OF STATE AND RELIGION IN QUEENSLAND TODAY.

ON THE EVE OF ANOTHER STATE ELECTION - EVEN A FEMALE PREMIER OF QUEENSLAND COULDN'T PERSUADE M.P'S TO PUT ASIDE THEIR 'FEELINGS' AND SUPPORT THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN IN REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CHOICES INCLUDING ACCESS TO ABORTION.

When the Premier's predecessor, Peter Beattie had more numbers to repeal this law written in Westminster of 1841 before Queensland even existed,  he didn't do it. 
My ALP branch discussed the issue at a meeting, alarmed that a young couple in Cairns were charged with acquiring an abortion, and sent a letter to our State Member for Ipswich West who then passed it on to the Attorney General Cameron Dick(2009).

We asked for the Queensland Government to implement the Queensland party platform that abortion be removed from the criminal code.


Premier Anna Bligh responded to a letter in format:

  "I have clearly and publicly stated my view that decisions in regard to abortion are best made by a woman, her partner and her doctor and that these decisions are ultimately private matters.
However, I also appreciate the strong and diverse views that exist in our community in regard to this matter.


For this reason, the Government has no plans to change the current legislation.


Any move to change the legislative arrangements concerning abortion would have to be introduced as a Private Member's Bill and be subject to a conscience vote. As Premier, I would not seek to bind any of my colleagues to a particular position."

Collecting signatures for a petition to delete the 110year old criminal legislation on abortion outside Queensland Parliament. My M.P. Wayne Wendt is telling me the order of the day and I'm thinking:

Shall I tell him I have a strong desire/ fantasy to chain myself to the railings of Queensland Parliament House...like my suffragette sisters of yesteryear who ran out of patience with all the promises, and waiting - till the realisation, they had to  stop being nice.


THEIR CONSCIENCE!

As an immature Labor member I don't understand the battle won to get decriminilisation of abortion into the party platform over ten years ago, and holding office for 20 years -  means ZERO.

I am mystified. And then it dawns on me - the biggest obstacles are the old Roman Catholic male M.P's. Of course, there are others who have claimed being other splintered Christians is affecting their vote, evidenced with the news posted on facebook to me there is a new group formed since the National Conference called Labor for Life - anti-abortion/euthanasia/gay marriage - This means, they have all the moral superiority and righteousness.

 Anne Summers description of  God's Police is apt.  


When I mention the influence of religion on politics, I get a blow-off...it's a sensitive subject, and I touch upon it because I  am an alien in Queensland.  There is a sense of,  don't mention the R word, as though it is only the LNP who can't differentiate between Faith and Secularity, (or fear a DLP like SPLIT - still a recent historical collective trauma.).


Being a Labor voter and now member I have an expectation that our politicians are more enlightened and progressive on the issues people contend with in daily life, but the Labor government was awfully constrained in its inability to be open and honest in a conversation about the realities and accidents of reproduction.

Even the Minister for Women, Karen Struthers didn't make a public cause for the women of Queensland and those up and coming; It's all about hard hats and women on boards but don't create an upset when there's a young couple in the dock.


Abortion couple not guilty
October 14, 2010


A Cairns couple charged over a home abortion have been found not guilty.
A Cairns District Court jury took less than an hour to find Tegan Simone Leach, 21, and her partner Sergie Brennan not guilty of charges of procuring an abortion and supplying drugs to procure an abortion following a three-day trial.
The couple were charged after police found empty blister packets of abortion drugs RU486 and Misoprostol during a search of their home on an unrelated matter in February last year.




They admitted in police interviews that Ms Leach took the pills, imported by Mr Brennan's family in the Ukraine, because they were not ready to have a child.
Under Queensland law, abortion is illegal except to protect the mother's life or her physical or mental wellbeing.
However, in his final directions to the jury, Judge Bill Everson said they had to be satisfied the drugs were noxious to Ms Leach's health, rather than the foetus.
A tense Ms Leach gripped her partner’s hand as the jury’s verdict was read out before tearfully thanking her legal team and hugging family members.
Pro-choice advocates in the public gallery greeted the verdict with cheers.
Outside court she thanked the jury for their verdict.
"I just want to say to all the jury and all the supporters for all their help," she said.
Asked whether she was relieved, she responded "very", but declined to answer further questions.
During the two-day trial, the court heard the couple had decided to have an abortion because they weren’t ready to have a child.


In his closing address, defence barrister Kevin McCreanor attacked the 110-year-old law under which his clients were charged and urged the jury to end his clients’ "nightmare".
However, Prosecutor Michael Byrne urged the jury to put personal feelings about the fairness of the law to one side.
"You are sitting in a court of law, not a court of morals," he said.


AAP: http://www.theage.com.au

In a time when more women are becoming legislators, this is what happens when feminist activists become part of the establishment? When it comes to the fundamental rights of women - the most senior Minister for Health, then Paul Lucas, the Attorney General et al had been determined to weather the 80per cent pro-choice now polling.
MP's on all sides raised their individual personal religious cultural upbringing as an excuse not to change the law or claim the religious vote was too strong and they didn't want to have minority yet vocal anti-abortionists protesting outside their windows.
No female liberation, from a law, even the British repealed in the 1960's.....but Queensland managed to leap jump the 1960's?
The scorn of their female colleagues is nothing to the inculcated hell and damnation warnings they  received at Catholic school. The divine laws of almighty Patriarchs reverberate through the ages to us in the 21st century.

The simple right for a woman to decide to develop a pregnancy or not is ignored - no matter the consequences of suffering. The evidence of forced pregnancies of our forebears with forced adoptions and orphaned brutality, holds no sway when the religious high holds the fusion of sperm and egg in some mystical shield.


This was what I thought when deciding to abort a fetus. I am typical of many women who in their reproductive lifetime have managed their fertility through scientific advances but will experience a miscarriage and an accidental pregnancy.


I loved the experience of pregnancy, childbirth and being a mother, and I'm very sad when a comrade can't countenance a woman that power over her own fertility.


The crux left over is now in 2012 - the most disadvantaged females who want to terminate an unwanted pregnancy have to struggle even more for lack of services and money. Those  women who are close to private clinics with money to spare, with friends and family who support them will be fine.

Same as it ever was.

Feminists chant for Arch Catholic conservative Tony Abbott to GET YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES! but incredibly it also does to a surprising amount of my contemporary  Labor comrades.
The privilege, politicians have to vote based on their conscience on something they will never have to make a decision about, or live with, which represents the self-determination of all the women in your electorate continues.
Yet nobody is drawing parallels with anti-abortionists inflicting the same theocratic impulse on every woman of fertile age in Australia as that of an Islamic State.
The intrinsic value of a woman's autonomy is scratched .
Anti-abortionists don't talk about the twelve year olds who have been raped on aboriginal reservations and have to travel 600ks to a facility or the pharmacist in a country town who doesn't believe in selling contraception.

Click, Read and Reaffirm with Anne Summers - a leading Australian feminist wordsmith.

Big Cross on this one for my own side. And of course it is personal: from the time a girl gets her period at puberty to the end of it in middle-age - a female is aware of her fertility cycle and avoiding pregnancy or encouraging it, and everybody else think they can tell you what to do, what you have to suffer, to sacrifice.

I'll have to do an new video for my YouTube account...dedicated to my Labors for Life! Thank goodness for Science and some Progress. Gratitude for humanitarian organisations like
www.childrenbychoice.org.au