Ringtail, your back.

Where have you been, you possum.

So what would be your opinions regards the following questions:-

How many abortions are carried out?
Why were they carried out?
What contraception was being used?
What were the possible reasons for the contraception failure, and can it be improved upon?
Was the abortion used as a form of contraception (and some ethnic groups use abortion this way)?
Was counselling carried out before or after the abortion?
Was the father included in that counselling?
What possible negative affects did the abortion have on the mother or father?
Do the mother or father wish for children in the future etc?

Do you think such questions should be answered, or left unanswered by politically suppressing the issue of abortion.

I am the author of this article. I would like to reply to the second comment by DavidJS, who remarks reasonably enough that I omitted reference to Emily Maquire's opinion piece on abortion (SMH 8 March). This is a fair comment, but I should note that the first version of my article was sent to opiniononline on 9 February this year, and I was asked at that time if I could add to its length a little. I did so, and the longer present version was sent to opiniononline on 1 March this year. (By the way, the piece was actually begun 3 years ago, as a defence of Billy McMahon against a comment by Phillip Adams, in the Weekend Australian, 9 March 2002, that McMahon was “brief but amusing”.) So I am afraid that my omission of any mention of Maguire's article is about publication lead-times rather than anything else more interesting. I also did not read the Maguire article until today: I am a bit behind with newspapers because of some pressing deadlines this week, plus an unexpected, and unwelcome, flood at home stemming from renovations. Thank you for the comments!

It won't go away, will it? And it fascinates me that Timkins considers it worthwhile to produce a long list of demands, without actually stating what the objective of the "enquiry" would be?

How will answers to these questions contribute to anything but the satisfaction of his own prurient curiosity? It has been clear for some time that if you believe that "life" starts at conception, you are highly likely to describe abortion as murder. If, on the other hand you consider life to begin when a foetus can sustain itself outside the womb, you have an entirely different viewpoint. And those who haven't decided yet, or see themselves somewhere in between, are by far the most confused.

One thing is crystal clear, asking dumb questions about contraception contributes nothing to the debate.

I read Emily Maguire's piece. It struck me as poorly-written and vague, but maybe that's because I felt her comments were naive. Perhaps it has never occurred to her that the "kind of hazy, euphemism-filled non-stance" on abortion recognises we live in a society where individual rights are paramount. While many people find abortion repugnant, it is recognised that it is a ‘compromise’ made to satisfy the liberal worldview.

Australia recognises legal personhood at birth. A foetus has not even the right to be born. While she's OK with this, some people are not. While the law ‘agrees’ with her, the law also ‘agrees’ with the detention of asylum seekers, and the sale of socially, physically and environmentally destructive products. Not exactly a rock-solid validation of an ethical viewpoint.

But what I find most disturbing is her desensitisation to living beings: that upon seeing a picture of a foetus at 11 weeks gestation, she recognises it not as a human being, but as a "mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman's body".

Her reference to a foetus as a "cell cluster" is a hazy euphemism itself. It’s just offensive that she uses it in the same way one would refer to a cancerous growth.

To have a debate which addressed what social groups of women utilised abortion most frequently would do much to understand how we, as a society, are not supporting them. (Timkins, yes, the fathers *are* important, I'm just writing about women now because they're the ones who physically have abortions.)

To prioritise abortion over the reinforcing of social support structures and addressing the fundamental factors contributing to abortion is, I feel, doing few women any favours. While many women may say, 'my uterus, my choice', what about the women who are saying, "I'd never make this decision if I had another option"?

Here is where we can *start* to support the women and children we are currently failing.

Pericles,

The objective of the “enquiry” would be to help us understand the problem – or at least to confirm whether or not one exists. You may not think so Pericles, but many others are looking up the number for Houston, as we speak.

I also seek the answers to Timkins’ questions, for they are not just his own. We are not mushrooms, Pericles - even if some choose to describe the early foetus as a blob of cells no different to a fungal growth.

Is a Jew a human being? Who decides? And if he is a human being, does he have an inalienable right to life? Or is it not inalienable but instead granted? But if granted, then clearly the Jews in Nazi Germany never had a right to life, since this right had not been granted them by the society in which they lived. If this is the case, then the Nazis cannot be censured over their treatment of the Jews, since they did not deny the Jews any rights to which they were entitled.

Who decides? All a matter of subjective opinion? But in a roomful of subjective opinions, which one's the right one? His who is the strongest? A might-makes-right world, in other words? But then where would that put women? Would women, with their famous upper-body strength, have even any rights in such a world totally dependent on might for any enjoyment of rights? They would be at the total mercy of whatever men they happened to find themselves surrounded by, subject to their whims and predilections. Their rights would be given them by their menfolk -- the crumbs that had fallen off the table of brute strength. How women lived would then totally depend on the convenience of their men. How ironic.