Scout,

I also agree that 'arguing' does not benefit women facing abortion, regardless of one's ethical orientation.

But these issues do need to be discussed. What should happen is that the vitriol, name-calling and nastiness so often associated with comment on abortion, is stopped. All people deserve to have their beliefs heard, and respected.

Harassing women must stop. But we all need to remember that coercion and harassment occur on both 'sides': whether it is outside an abortion clinic as the woman is about to undergo abortion, or the social response to a women becoming pregnant under 'less-than-ideal' circumstances.

Many women are harassed into having abortions they don't want to have. And many women finding themselves experiencing distress and grief over their abortions are harassed by the pro-choice contingent into keeping quiet, being thankful for her 'choice', and bullied into thinking that she is abnormal - that if she were only 'well-adjusted', she wouldn't have any problems dealing with her abortion. See the vitriolic pro-choice response to Melinda Tankard-Reist's book on post-abortion grief, 'Giving Sorrow Words', for example.

A debate is useless; dialogue is vital.

But fundamental to a dialogue is the elimination of blaming and name-calling: pro-life is not necessarily 'no-choice' or 'anti-choice'; pro-choice is not necessarily 'pro-abortion'. These tags are just as pointless, and just as counterproductive.

Both ideologies exist on a continuum: believe it or not, it is possible for some women identifying as pro-choice to have more in common with other women identifying as pro-life, than others identifying as pro-choice. Fundamentalism exists in both arenas.

Nothing in this abortion 'debate' is as black and white as the media would have us believe.

Tracey, thanks for a very reasoned contribution.
Meanwhile I must contest some of the comments from
YABBY, Your statement that thanks to sex education, there were on;y 6 births per 1000 from 15-19 yr. olds in Holland compared to 53 per 1000 in the US might not mean much. It might mean that the Dutch kids are having abortions at a higher rate than the Americans.

In Australia we have widespread sex education in schools. Yet abortion figures from the Federal Health Dept. shows that in 2003-04, 16.6% of the 91, 358 abortions performed in Australia were from 15-19 yo's. I don't think that says a lot for sex education as the answer to teenage pregnancies. In some States it was 20% or more.

Your concern that a return to "backyard" abortions would mean a rate of one death per 3,000 is probably guesswork. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, famous former abortionist who admits to performing 60,000 abortions before he reversed his attitude and became an opponent of abortion, [see video "The Silent Scream"] said in answer to this question, "One can expect that if abortion is ever driven underground again, even non-physicians will be able to perform this procedure with remarkable safety. No woman need die if she chooses to abort during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy" {Aborting America, Doubleday 1979 p.193]
In Portugal, Italy and Germany, the figures quoted as dying from illegal abortions have been shown to be grossly exaggerated to an absurd degree.
Probably so in Austraia too.

While I'm at it, Yabby has complained that "the Godsquad aka The Vatican" is to blame for the opposition to abortion. I'm sure that The Pope would be only too pleased to acknowledge that the Catholic Church has led the fight against abortion. However there are others such as the Muslims and those with no religious affiliation whatever. They just feel it's wrong. Like a woman I know whose daughter became pregnant, and was being pressured by the man's mother [supposedly a Catholic] to abort . This woman, with no religious connections stood firm against abortion, and now her daughter and partner have a lovely 11 y.o. daughter. They have been unable to have any more children so she is all that more precious to them [and her grandmother who saved her from the abortionist's knife].

Al, you really are going to have to inform yourself a bit better then
quoting the lady down the street who has a nice kid. Every egg she
has shed, could have turned out to be a cute kid. Fact is, we can't
keep them all, get used to the laws of nature.

If you want to know a little about what is going on in the US, the Allan Gutmacher Institute is not a bad place to start. The link is as follows: http://www.agi-usa.org/index.html

There is a clear link between good sex education at school and teenage pregnancy and contraception. Australian figures are somewhere in the middle of Western countries, which means most likely our sex education is only average. European teenagers have a lower pregnancy rate because more of them are on the pill, thats the basics of it. The highest pregnancy rates in the US are in the Southern Bible belt, where half of all schools only teach abstinence.
When they then break their abstinence, which the majority of them
do, bingo they are pregnant.

Read up some WHO information about what happens in countries where abortion is banned and women turn to coathangers and all sorts of other methods, to get rid of their unwanted pregnancies. The figures are actually worse then what I quoted.

But at the end of the day its a far bigger question. The pope and the Muslims can preach and do what they please, nobody is forcing any of them to have an abortion. For those of us who think they
are preaching nothing but pure gobbledygook for their own vested
interests, I remind you that we live in a secular democracy, not in a country of religious tyranny. Just about every campain against abortion anywhere, has the Catholic Church behind it. Perhaps they should first of all teach their priests to stop interfering with little boys, before they come preaching to the rest of us.

Luckily 85% of Australians are pro choice, whew! The blocking of
RU 486 was simply a question of more Catholic interference in the political system.

Some questions Tony Abbott should respond to regarding comparison of death as a result of abortion, whether it be surgical abortion or use of RU 486 and death during childbirth:

I refer to this article:

Pro-life groups given pregnancy counselling funds
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200511/s1498231.htm

Question 1: As there is 27 times more chance of a woman dying during pregnancy and/or childbirth than that of either surgical abortion or taking an abortion pill (RU486), will the Commonwealth accept liability and provide compensation to a family in the event of death during pregnancy and/or childbirth in the event that counselling being funded by the Commonwealth, designed to discourage women from having abortions, results in a woman deciding to continue with the pregnancy and finding herself among the following statistics:

Report on Maternal Deaths in Australia, 1994-96
http://www.npsu.unsw.edu.au/mda9496preface.htm

“There were 90 maternal deaths in the triennium 1997-99, and there were 758,030 confinements, indicating one maternal death per 8,423 confinements.

Question 2: Will the Commonwealth accept liability and provide compensation in the event a woman regrets her decision to continue with the pregnancy and suffers hardships or depression in life as a result of counselling which may have deterred her from going ahead with an abortion? I refer to this report and expect that the women in Australia would be affected the same way:

Abortion cuts risk of later blues
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17070446%255E23289,00.html
“PROCEEDING with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy is more likely to cause depression than having an abortion, a controversial new study has found. Researchers in the US questioned 1247 women who aborted or delivered an unwanted first pregnancy between 1970 and 1992. The women were interviewed over several years. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, found that going ahead with an unwanted pregnancy was more likely to lead to depression. “

Felix

Interesting questions, Felix.

This is why it's so important that coercion and pressure should not be allowed to influence a woman's decision to terminate her pregnancy, or to proceed with her pregnancy, if that decision is ill-suited to her personal circumstances.

When either of the above happens, women are more likely to experience grief and psychological distress, which can manifest immediately, or take some years - in the meantime, having a profound effect on her self-esteem and interpersonal relationships.

Women should be completely informed of all their options and the associated risks, and adequate support systems put in place to deal with them if and when they arise.

A dialogue, not debate, over abortion is vital to enable this approach to succeed. Working on the present model, neither side - *generally* - is able to present an unbiased and comprehensive picture of all the factors at play in a 'crisis' pregnancy.