I’m so embarrassed. This is worse than impromptu haka at the Outback bar in London, worse than letting people poo in our national parks, worse than knighting rugby players, writes Lisa Scott.
Ireland, for God’s sake.
We used to laugh at Ireland: "fiddle dee dee potato", the Papist poverty of too many children, laugh at how backwards it was, shipping their women off over the briny, all those poor girls puking over the ferry railings into the Irish Sea, roiling on the greasy waters of a dishonourable return.
And here’s us, 11,000 miles away in the progressive sunshine of a new world, the first country to give women the vote, on to our third female leader when the US hasn’t even managed one, and abortion is still a crime in this country. Criminality is the reason it is a taboo subject, a secret kept whole lives, when even our toilets don’t distinguish gender anymore. While a quiet revolution in social attitudes was happening in Ireland, abortion law reform in New Zealand has been a boulder refusing to roll up hill since the days of Helen. Jacinda is our Sisyphus now. And if an unmarried pregnant woman can’t speak truth to power about women’s right to choose, then we are the stupidest country in the world and I may as well die of shame right now.
"I didn’t know abortion was illegal in New Zealand," the Mountain Man said.
And why would he? He’s never needed one. But if you do, unless the pregnancy is the result of incest or there is foetal abnormality, you’ll need to convince two doctors the pregnancy is making you crazy or presents a physical danger. The high number of abortions on mental health grounds in New Zealand has led pro-lifers to express concern that the mental health exception is being used to allow abortion on demand. Yes and ...? Let me know if I’m being obtuse here, but if abortion was legal, women wouldn’t have to use the mental health exemption. If you’re married and your soon-to-be ex-husband does not agree, as happened to a woman I know, then you might find yourself forced to carry a child the result of sex you did not consent to.
Women shouldn’t have to lie desperately to safeguard their own right to choose whether or not to give birth. It is oppressive, draconian. As if we were walking wombs owned by others in a Christian theonomy that has overthrown women’s rights, like Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, subjugated to misogyny.
I just read that again. Maybe we are. This truth is stranger than fiction. The truth that, if your daughter became pregnant today and couldn’t afford (financially/emotionally) to have a child or care for it, she would have to lie to a medical professional, jump through needless psychologically painful hoops, perhaps even fly to Australia, just to stop both lives being made miserable; and if she told anyone about it they would judge her.
Bad enough we had to suffer through years of National inaction and what for? When the Greens pledged to decriminalise and thus reduce stigma, Prime Minister John favoured the status quo. Bill, a Catholic (and also a man might I point out for those not paying attention), refused to take abortion out of the Crimes Act, only to be trounced by the most Catholic country in the world, a country that practically invented guilt. Now they have nothing to be guilty about. And neither should our daughters.
In 1961, people viewed avocados with suspicion, women did not work, New Zealand was white, Christian and we probably still buried Chinese in a different part of the cemetery. Inside toilets and electric refrigeration were new-fangled. Abortion was written into the Crimes Act then by a man in black-framed glasses and a shirt buttoned tight. Doesn’t this make you tired? It’s so pathetic, so past due, like stumbling into a rip in the time continuum and going back to a cringeworthy era.
And we’re still there.
