In a recent article about Tony Abbott’s adventures (’After the DNA, will Abbott get a reality check?’, Melbourne Age, 24 Mar. 2005) Leslie Cannold asked whether ‘Abbott’s complex personal situation will lead him to question his rigid and long-held views of female sexuality and reproductive obligation’:

According to psychologist Dr Susie Allanson, a counsellor of 15 years at the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic, the odds are regrettably slim. Over the years Allanson has counselled a number of women who are not just morally opposed to abortion but have actively campaigned against it being safe and legal. Yet, when they have found themselves unhappily pregnant, they decide on abortion.

Essentially, such women convince themselves that they are special cases - to the point of being actually unique - and that their situations are thus quite irrelevant to the cases of all those female ‘murderers’ who have abortions.

This reminded me of similar reports I had seen in the past, most notably in Cynthia Gorney’s Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (Simon and Schuster 2000), 275-6:

Sometimes [abortion clinic] counsellors would sink into conference-room chairs at the end of the day and trade war stories about patients who had proceeded through the entire abortion process while insisting from start to finish that they were pro-life …[T]hese particular women frustrated [the counsellors] intensely, the protesters who had come in from the anti-abortion ranks long enough to take care of their urgent little personal problem and then go right back out to the picket lines …[I]t was awfully hard to sound compassionate when your patient was sitting there explaining that her situation was so very grave and special that she had to have an abortion, even though she didn’t believe abortion should be legal in the first place.

A senior counsellor recalled one such patient in the following terms:

…I cannot tell you the disdain she had for everybody who was in the waiting room. But it was okay for her to be there … She had protested, and gone to meetings, and I think she signed something in church. But it would kill her parents if she were pregnant, and her relationship with the boy was over, and so forth and so on …

Of course, not all anti-choice activists are so glaringly hypocritical. Several years ago, one of Australia’s most voluble anti-feminists was told by a trembling daughter that she had fallen pregnant to her boyfriend. After throwing a ten-minute tantrum that would have done justice to a two year-old, the matriarch delivered herself of this gem:

The only good thing to come out of this disaster is that at least you had the decency not to use contraception!

Filed in: Abortion