In 2011 I had the terrible misfortune of falling in love. It was all very inconvenient. He lives in America, I live in Australia. We threw common sense, caution and several sets of airfares to the wind and went for it.
Our long distance courtship coincided with what many refer to as America’s “war on women”: the legislative changes put forward at the state and federal levels which used healthcare reform to restrict the rights of women, particularly in the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential election.
In this war, women across America saw their access to abortion and contraception become, to borrow a phrase, political playthings. Every day it seemed there was another story which told me that my kind of women were not welcome in the United States.
In 2011, 225 of 435 members of the US House of Representatives voted in favour of every anti-choice measure which came before them.
A week before I arrived to meet my beloved’s family, their home state of Wisconsin re-elected Republican Scott Walker as governor. Wisconsin is not traditionally conservative, yet Walker remains well seated on his anti-choice, pro-gun platform.
In June last year, Texas politician Wendy Davis’ 11 hour filibuster failed to stop a law which has forced the majority of abortion clinics in Texas to close. In March 2014, a law forbidding non-lifesaving abortion care from being covered by health insurance is expected in Michigan (another Northern, non-conservative state). Women are invited to take out special coverage if they are concerned about becoming pregnant from rape.
The US Supreme Court will soon decide if for-profit companies are allowed to exclude certain types of contraception from their healthcare coverage. The result will determine whether I keep taking the Pill or get a two-year hormonal implant. Small government, right?
Perhaps the most pervasive, sinister trend to make its way from state to state is the Personhood Amendment which changes the legal definition of a person to include foetuses, and in some cases fertilised eggs. This is a sneaky way of getting around Roe vs Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision which protects a woman’s right to abortion up to 20 weeks’ gestation.
In a speech to NARAL – Pro-Choice America, University of Wisconsin law professor R. Alta Charo said, “[…] by elevating a fertilised egg to the legal status of a live, breathing, suffering woman we’ve invited legal interventions not only to prohibit abortion or in vitro fertilisation but to exacerbate the troubling trend of women being locked up because they didn’t follow medical advice during their pregnancy, because their rights were seen as inferior to those of the foetus.”
For me, a society’s stance on abortion is shorthand for how much they value women. You either value women as people, as citizens, as humans with hearts and minds, or you value women as baby-makers whose most important role is to act as host for a being that has human rights but is yet to take a breath.
In the lead-up to my decision to emigrate to the US, I’ve had to come to terms with a country which, in many jurisdictions, reduces my human rights the moment I become pregnant. There are currently 38 American states which have similar foetal protection laws, 23 of which apply foetal homicide to the earliest stages of pregnancy.
But I’m in no position to get righteous about home.
In New South Wales, I face the reality of having to travel from Sydney to Canberra if I want to have an abortion without risk of criminal prosecution.
“Zoe’s Law“, currently before the NSW upper house, would be the first one in Australia to grant legal protection to a foetus. This law, first proposed by anti-choice poster child Reverend Fred Nile, has since been adjusted to protect abortion rights. Nonetheless, it establishes that an unborn child has rights separate to that of its mother.
Local groups such as EMILY’s List and Children By Choice are gearing up for a big year. Cory Bernardi’s continuous reprisal of any woman who has an abortion is a sobering reminder of how Australia’s parliaments are not safe from the kind of lunatic fringe so established in the US.
Because America, in its vastness, can harbour within it huge numbers of fringe dwellers. Thanks to the internet, members of these minorities can find one another and present themselves as a mainstream movement. This means that when Australia’s fringe dwellers speak up, their arguments have already been normalised and marked as valid by a media used to an American viewpoint.
When Wendy Davis kept standing long into the Texas night, I, with countless other Australian women, stood with her on Twitter. It was a moment of pure trans-Pacific solidarity. Davis was not fighting a separate fight for the separate concerns of Texas women. In her, women everywhere found a champion for everyone whose autonomy becomes the plaything of men who think they know better.
So when I find myself an American resident shouting at the TV as another old rich white man tries to take my power away, I’ll know that it’s for my countrywomen that I shout too.