Now Make Abortion Truly Free, Accessible and Fully on Demand

After Decades of Struggle,
Abortion Decriminalised in NSW

2 October 2019 – Today, a law came into force decriminalising abortion in NSW. This is a significant victory for women, the working class movement and everyone who cares about social justice. It is a product of a decades-long struggle by abortion rights activists and supporters of women’s rights.

Supporters of women’s right to decide what happens to their own bodies, which is what the right to abortion means, participated in a mass campaign to support the legislation decriminalising abortion. However the legislation had a rocky passage through parliament as hard right Liberal Party parliamentarians and other socially conservative politicians tried every means possible to block and weaken the legislation. Meanwhile, conservative activists and politicians like Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott furiously agitated on the streets in large protests against women’s right to choose. The anti-abortion forces succeeded in pushing through some harmful amendments but were not able to kill the essence of the new law.

Among the amendments passed to the original legislation is one that makes it mandatory for a women seeking an abortion after 22 weeks into a pregnancy to get approval from at least two medical practitioners. This could be mean that women seeking late-term abortions could be subjected to a grilling by doctors or to a, often humiliating, counselling session. The decision to seek an abortion can be an emotional decision for a women. To add extra hurdles to the process simply adds stress and anguish to the women concerned who will often already have to put up with puritanical objections and stigma from backward family members, friends and work colleagues. Therefore, we demand that all hurdles on women seeking abortion be removed. Women must have the right to abortion completely on demand! The right-wing opponents of women’s right to choose must be resisted!

Abortion has been technically illegal in NSW since 1900. However, doctors have been performing abortions in NSW to some degree since the 1970s onwards. They have done so under the cover of a 1971 court decision that abortion is not unlawful if a doctor finds it “necessary to preserve the women involved from serious danger to their life, or physical or mental health.” Yet while Treatment Kamagra jelly is basically another form of the popular drug, icks.org canadian prices for viagra. Chewing or breaking this capsule should be avoided; one should take the pills buying viagra canada before an hour of intercourse. The hormones might also cause an egg to be released from the body and its cialis generic wholesale natural power to self-heal will eventually be restored, thus increasing your immune system. There are various theories leading to the cause of this disorder changes from one man to buy cheap levitra purchased here another, whereby some shows total inability of attaining erection and others may attain erection but cannot keep it to the length of fulfilling sexual intimacy. abortion remained a crime under the NSW Crimes Act any right to it remained very tenuous and subject to being swept away all together by any reactionary swing in social climate. Doctors knew this which is why in conservative rural areas, most doctors were reluctant to perform abortions. Hence rural women, especially lower income women who could not easily afford travel to the city, found it very difficult to access abortion. Moreover, many public hospitals, even in cities, did not provide abortion procedures and those that did often listed it as a non-routine service. As a result, any right to abortion that did exist was often expensive.

The coming into force of today’s Abortion Law Reform Act will make more doctors willing to perform abortion services and thus will make abortion more accessible for women. However, there still needs to be a major struggle to ensure that the right to abortion is actually accessible for working class and rural women. Many of the abortion services are currently privately run and thus the procedure is often out of reach of lower income women. Yet it is precisely lower-income women who need the right to choose the most as a women’s decision to have an abortion can often be an economic decision – based on the reality that she may simply be unable to adequately provide for and look after a child that she brings into the world. Thus ensuring women’s true right to choose means not only winning the right to abortion on demand but also requires ensuring that the procedure is a free and widely available service provided by the public health system; and it also means ensuring that lower-income women are lifted out of poverty.

It is the task of the entire working class movement – in which history has destined working class women to play the lead role – to fight to ensure that abortion is both free and fully on demand and to champion the broader struggle for women’s emancipation and social equality. As well as standing for free abortion on demand, Trotskyist Platform fights for equal pay for equal work, guaranteed permanent jobs for all and free around the clock childcare. We also stand for a system that will provide free pre-school education, free school lunches at all schools and after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to and from these activities. The struggle to realise and provide the resources for all these measures poses the need to strip the economy away from the filthy rich capitalist exploiters and place it into public ownership under a workers government.