Anne Lastman was born in Calabria, southern Italy in approximately 1951. Her family later moved to Perth, WA and Anne probably entered her first marriage around 1970, soon giving birth to two sons. However, this marriage broke up and Anne had two abortions, one a 10-12 week-old foetus about 1973 and the other about 1978 at 16 weeks’ gestation.

Anne was raised as a Catholic but adopted a pro-choice position and exercised her right to abortion when the occasion demanded it. As she explained to a journalist, ‘Her moral dilemma [at the time of the abortions] was overtaken by the personal crisis she was going through. Both abortions happened because of failing relationships.’ Anne then spent several years as a single parent, putting her two boys into day-care from the time they were two or three years old. After some time she married again, her new husband being Andrew Lastman. In 1982, Anne gave birth to a third son, and in 1985 to a fourth.

Anne says that her abortions traumatised her and gave her nightmares. She stopped attending church for many years because:
… I could not stand being before God with the knowledge of what I had done, and the worse knowledge that [my aborted] infants (I was told) could never enter heaven.

Around 1995 the Lastman family moved from Perth to Melbourne, Vic. There she became involved in ‘pro-life activities’, including demonstrating outside abortion clinics. In 1996 she also began ‘counselling’ other women who had had abortions.

In 1999, Lastman set up an entity called ‘Victims of Abortion Trauma Counselling and Information Services’ (‘VOA’ for short). This is a kind of one-person ‘charity’ which offers:
… post-abortive men and women a safe place and a sacred space where it would be possible for them to speak about their abortion experience and their sadness/feelings following this procedure.

Read the full article [PDF] …

Filed in: Abortion, Catholicism

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

Filed in: Abortion, Voluntary Euthanasia

You might like to know some more about the people who support Bill Muehlenberg on his CultureWatch site, and even occasionally perform the difficult feat of outflanking him on the right.

I won’t bother for the moment with Jonathan Sarfati and Tas Walker, both of whom are senior staffers at Creation Ministries International (CMI), Australia’s leading Young Earth Creationist (YEC) group. Brief (and glowing) biographies are available for both of these gentlemen at the CMI site. Muehlenberg is uncharacteristically coy when it comes to defining his own position on creationism (YEC, Old Earth Creationist, Intelligent Design supporter etc.), but YECs like Sarfati and Walker are among his favourite people.

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Filed in: Abortion, People, Politics

Margaret Tighe’s Right to Life Australia (RTLA) is still practising ‘punishment politics’. Aspiring politicians can have conservative views on just about every topic under the sun, but if they’re a shade wobbly on ‘life’ issues, there’s a good chance that RTLA will mount a campaign against them.

Here’s an example of their work, taken from the November 2006 Victorian state election:

In Kilsyth the local Member was Dymphna Beard from the [Australian Labor Party]. Dymphna’s membership on [pro-choice] Emily’s List and her vote in favour of destructive embryo research made it important for us to defeat her candidacy. She is no longer a Member of Parliament.

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Filed in: Abortion, Christian Right, Politics

As we head for the silly season, I thought you might like this story. Written by Deirdre Moloney and first appearing in Right To Life News of January 1982, I’ve seen its basic idea repeated in several other articles over the years, but Deirdre did it best.

Ask most anti-choice campaigners when human life begins and they will unhesitatingly reply, ‘At conception!’ But not all of them. Over to Deirdre:

There has been much speculation as to when life begins, but as far as I know, no one has publicly used the argument of preconceptual consciousness, that is, of the awareness of personhood on the part of the sperm, even before it meets the ovum.

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Filed in: Abortion, Fundamentalism

A group of conservative Christian bodies has just formed an umbrella organisation aimed at defeating the proposed decriminalisation of abortion in Victoria. Abortion law reform will probably become a public issue no matter who wins the November 25 state election.

The new body is called CADOA – the Coalition Against Decriminalisation of Abortion – and is comprised of all the usual suspects plus some (mainly Pentecostal) hangers-on. Salt Shakers are giving CADOA a bit of a push, not to mention the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Family Association, Babette Francis’s Endeavour Forum, the Fatherhood Foundation and the hoary old Right to Life Association.

It’s always worth keeping an eye on these ad hoc lobbies but you won’t get too depressed if you remember two things. First, most of them sink without trace. And second, one of the biggest ’silent’ political movements in this country is the pro-choice lobby – normally almost invisible, but when its interests are seriously threatened, watch out!

Filed in: Abortion, Politics

Over the years, many anti-abortion ‘pregnancy counselling centres’ have conned women into continuing with unwanted pregnancies. Democrats’ Senator Natasha Stott Despoja wants to make it an offence for individuals or corporations to advertise pregnancy counselling without declaring any anti-choice stance or automatic refusal to refer clients for abortion.

This has sent the National Civic Council’s News Weekly into a frenzy. Stott Despoja and her allies are conducting an ‘obscene modern-day witch-hunt’ as part of ‘a concerted campaign to overturn social conservative values and influence at all levels in the community’:

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Filed in: Abortion

David Rivers of Mordialloc in Melbourne is such a spoilsport. Just as I’m about to launch into the Adelaide-based Southern Cross Bioethics Institute (SCBI) and their controversial ’surveys’ into subjects like abortion and therapeutic cloning, David comes up with this excellent letter to the Age. How dare he do all my work for me?

A Catholic organisation, the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, commissions a survey into attitudes to therapeutic cloning and, hey presto, finds that most Australians (51 per cent) oppose it. But this finding contradicts all previous independent surveys suggesting 80 per cent support it.

Southern Cross previously commissioned a survey into attitudes to abortion, and similarly concluded that most Australians (63 per cent) opposed abortion on demand. Again, this contradicts a number of independent surveys finding up to 80 per cent support for abortion on demand.

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Filed in: Abortion, Catholicism

Could it be that moderate Coalition MPs are finally starting to see the Christian Right for what it is? The RU 486 ‘abortion pill’ vote earlier this year stripped conservative Catholic Health Minister Tony Abbott of his power to keep the drug out of Australia. Now Prime Minister John Howard has decided to allow a conscience vote on therapeutic cloning in the teeth of opposition from evangelical Protestants like Tasmanian Senator Guy Barnett.

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Filed in: Abortion, Christian Right, Politics, Stem Cell Research

Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja (Dem. SA) thinks that anti-choice pregnancy counselling centres should have to tell women that they never refer for abortions. Jenny Stokes of Salt Shakers thinks this is a silly idea. If the question of abortion arises, counsellors should:

… explain the harm that can result from such a choice – such as medical complications, post-abortion trauma and breast cancer, all of which are medical facts. (Salt Shakers Submission: Inquiry into Transparent Advertising and Notification of Pregnancy Counselling Services Bill 2005, Jun. 2006)

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Filed in: Abortion