On abortion

From Broadsheet yesterday:

In a debate last night over the approval process for RU486, the "abortion drug," Australian Senate leader Lyn Allison made the personal political. Allison told the Senate: "An estimated one in three women have had an abortion, and I am one of them."

Allison's candor is a far cry from the views voiced by many of our own women politicians, such as Sen. Hillary Clinton, who distanced herself from the polarizing issue by calling abortion "a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women."

Telling her story to the Sydney Morning Herald, Allison explained that she "became pregnant at 18, and having a child at that time would have changed her life in ways she was not prepared to contemplate." Musing on the sacrifices she would have had to make, she said, "I probably wouldnÂ’t be here [in the Senate]."

While Allison had tried to steer away from a philosophical pro-choice/pro-life debate and stay focused on whether approval for the drug should lie with the country's Health Minister or the Therapeutic Goods Administration, she soon became frustrated with what she was hearing. "Women are fully human," she said, "It is galling listening to the men, and it is mostly men, who have such contempt for women who terminate unwanted pregnancies, who have neither the compassion nor the understanding of the huge and, for many, daunting task of taking an embryo the size of a grain of rice to adulthood."

It shouldn't be necessary, but I wish some female US congressional leaders would be as candid as Allison, instead of always trying to avoid the issue. Because really, it's about misogyny, and more pro-choice women in positions of power need to stand up and confront their anti-abortion male (and female) colleagues on that. I don't think anyone should have to "out" themselves, but if you support abortion rights, I would assume there's no shame there, so why not talk about it? Making it personal, as Allison did, refocuses the discourse to one of saving the mother-to-be from ruining her life, and makes it less about "killing babies." But maybe that's just naive. In this country, the anti-abortion gang would probably just make those who've outed themselves the target of "baby killer" personal attacks.