Abortion Gets a Hearing, Sort of

A review of the documentary, MY Foetus, which recently aired on ABC television

I first saw my son, Robert, on ultrasound at thirteen weeks. We watched him stir and put his hand to his cheek, as he still does in his sleep.

The most beautiful images in Julia Black's grim film, "My Foetus", were achieved revolutionary 3D ultrasound technology. to watch a baby at twelve weeks doing a two-footed jump, little arms pumping, was as astounding as the other famous two-footed jump by Neil Armstrong on the moon. For technology to have shed such light on the dark side of the womb is, once more, a giant leap for mankind.

I am confident that parents who, in ignorance, take their offspring to be aborted, would think again when they see their tiny child in such glorious detail, alive and beautiful and busy. Importantly, from a medico legal perspective, the bar has been raised for truly informed consent about abortion, since doctors cannot in good faith omit such highly relevant visual information.

Julia Black herself, who supports abortion and whose father heads a multinational abortion company, comments that "If anything could persuade me that destroying a foetus is perhaps wrong, it is this technology".

In the film, we view Professor Campbell's exquisite ultrasound images - some of which he has displayed at www.createhealth.org He tells Black that his views on abortion have been changed, and he now feels twelve weeks should be the upper limit for social abortion.

Reviewing Black's film, leading feminist Naomi Wolf observes that "At 12 weeks a pregnant woman can already see her foetus's resemblance to it's father or mother." She too retreats from the practice of late abortion, which she calls "a terrible act", and argues that "the limit should be about three months. After that, rather than abortion, a network of supportive adoption agencies should be on hand to help and sustain the pregnant woman and her baby."

Civility seems to be breaking out in the abortion wars. Black's documentary is respectful of both sides, and she comments, "I was impressed by the sincerity and by the sincerity and conviction of the anti-abortion people I talked to. "Wolf reports, "I was amazed to discover, when I actually listened to anti-abortion activists instead of demonizing them, how much common ground both sides had."

This common ground includes concern for women who have abortions because they feel there is no support from boyfriend or parents or school or society. women who know nothing of Wolf's "network of supportive adoption agencies". women who surrender, in Germaine Greer's phrase, to "the last non-choice in a long list of non-choices", and then suffer the cruel emotional can sequences of having created a place of death within their own bodies.

There is also a common revulsion for the "terrible act" of late abortion, which is indistinguishable from infancide - being performed on babies even older than those in our hospital nurseries and only distinguished from murder by a technicality. "My Foetus" screened on the tenth anniversary of the revelation of commercial late-term abortion practices in Queensland, where even entirely healthy babies of entirely healthy mothers are killed by the unspeakable method of "cranial decompression", or "partial-birth abortion". The partly-delivered premmie baby has no pain relief as scissors are stabbed through its head and the skull crushed.

If our morally menopausal society can still raise the passion to condemn something as "evil" (not merely "inappropriate"), this is the occasion. Black's film fails to do so. she interviews late-term abortionist, dr John Parsons, who agrees that it is "not nice" to see "dismembered pieces of foetus falling into a bucket between my legs". Nevertheless, he will do this to a baby, who could at that age, be given alive to the pediatrician, if he feels the child is "seriously not wanted".

Others are also numb to this evil. responding to the new ultrasound technology, Rachel Evans in the Observer, 11th July, asserted that rights to late abortion not be "whittled away". With the fathomless narcissism of a woman who, gazing on the waters of the womb, sees no image of a baby but only the reflection of her own moral seriousness, she pleads respect for the "difficult choices" women face. "No woman casually decides to have an abortion beyond 20 weeks", she says. Evans would rake seriously three of the casual justifications for late term abortion given by our Queensland doctor: "the woman not knowing she was pregnant", desertion of a partner", and "minor abnormalities".

The public would support a ban on late abortions, and on early "social" abortions, if it were not for the paralyzing effect of the abortion lobby's trump card: "the injuries and deaths associated with back=street abortions", as Black puts it. No matter how shocked people are at the cruel killing of babies, they are equally shocked at the image of women dying at the hands of backyard butchers.

In fact, this trump card is a conjurer's card, a clever deception. Contrary to popular illusion, legalizing abortion was so trivial an element in improving women's safety that it does not show up in the historical record. All reduction in deaths from abortion last century was achieved by medical advances alone - antibiotics, transfusions, surgical advances - predating any chance in legal status. the nightmare scenario of women dying in droves in the backyard is simply not possible in a post-antibiotic world, and should not be used to terrify public debate.

Governments must effectively ban the abortion of half-born preemie babies, and indeed the commercial killing by selfish adults of all younger babies. They must do whatever it takes to set up Wolf's network of supportive adoption agencies and other community resources to enable a distressed woman to let her baby live.

My foetus, our Robert, was just the same as the one hundred thousand of his peers who were killed that year in Australia's abortion clinics. A complete primary school worth od "seriously unwanted" children every day. "Children", as Bob Ellis put it, "who would have loved you".

David van Gend is a Toowoomba GP and Queensland secretary for the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life