Women’s Forum Australia - policies and people
Posted by Brian on Sat 8-Dec-2007 at 3:35 pm
Women’s Forum Australia (WFA) is a conservative Christian lobby group, although it would strongly resist this description. Its leadership is and always has been drawn largely from conservative Catholics like Katrina George and Louise Brosnan and conservative Baptists like Melinda Tankard Reist and Johanna Lynch.
WFA is vehemently opposed to women’s access to abortion and other technologies that enable women to control their reproductive lives, e.g. access to RU486 and therapeutic cloning. They also campaign actively against voluntary euthanasia. When the organisation was first launched it described itself as ‘pro-woman and pro-life’, though in recent times this slogan seems to have been abandoned.
In recent months, WFA has deviated from its central anti-choice message by undertaking ‘motherhood’ campaigns against the sexualisation of young girls. This anti-pornography message is consistent with the attitudes of the religious right and does not disguise WFA’s fundamental objective: to restrict women’s capacity to make choices about their reproductive lives, in line with the most conservative Christian religious doctrines.
This article explores the group’s objectives, policies and personalities.
Read the full article (PDF): Women’s Forum Australia - policies and people