As the Catholic Weekly goes to print, polls are still open in the United States and so we do not know who the next president of the USA will be.
I must. confess to enjoying the US election season very much. The early 2000s drama, The West Wing, remains my all-time favourite TV show and thanks to the drama of US politics, we get a new season every four years.
While I enjoy the spectacle, I don’t envy voters in the US, particularly this year, when they are faced with two incredibly undesirable candidates as the potential leader of their country.
There is, however, one aspect of US presidential elections that has always had me a little green with envy, and that’s the fact that abortion is always an election issue. I love that every candidate in every debate and every interview is asked their position on abortion because, as the saying goes, the true measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable. In other words, if you want to know whether a government is going to recognise and defend the rights and uphold the dignity of every human person, consider whether and to what extent they are willing to defend the rights and uphold the dignity of the unborn.
For this reason, I have been delighted that abortion is again a topic of conversation here in Australia as well.
In South Australia, a bill that would have required mothers seeking late-term abortions of viable babies to deliver the child alive and place it up for adoption rather than deliver it after it is killed in utero was defeated by just one vote. That’s an extraordinary result for the first time such a law has been attempted, and I’m certain that Professor Joanna Howe, who led the campaign for the bill, Liberal MP Ben Hood who tabled it and others will eventually be successful in getting it through a future parliament.
Abortion was also part of the debate in last month’s Queensland election, with crossbench MP Robbie Katter indicating that he would introduce a private members’ bill to require that babies born alive following a failed abortion receive medical care, and also consider winding back some other aspects of the state’s extreme abortion laws. It became an election issue because now-Premier David Crisafulli voted against abortion in 2018 and had previously indicated that party members would be given a conscience vote on any potential repeal. With a number of pro-life candidates on the ballot, it was possible that such a bill would be successful.
At a federal level, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price reportedly also said that she wanted abortion on the national agenda, saying she did not agree with abortion after the first trimester and labelling full-term abortions as “infanticide.” Her comments were met with a very quick distancing by some of her female colleagues in the Liberal Party as well as in the government, who doubled down on their pro-abortion stance.
Obviously, MPs who are close to an election do not want controversial issues on the agenda, because they risk derailing otherwise carefully planned political messaging campaigns and so the attempts to hose down the debate in Queensland and at a national level came quickly.
But I’m not sure the momentum is on the side of the culture of death anymore.
That these issues are front and centre in multiple jurisdictions, years after abortion until birth was decriminalised in every state and territory, suggests that the tide may be turning, even if ever so slightly.
That pro-aborts who thought that abortion was so embedded in the culture that future generations would not question it, much less oppose it, are now worried that the laws might start to be wound back or even repealed, shows that they know the pro-life movement is not going anywhere.
That the face of the pro-life movement are increasingly young women, rather than the oft-painted caricature of old men, means that it won’t be so easily silenced.
Something good is happening here, my friends. And it is only just beginning.
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On a personal note, thank you to everyone who joined me in praying for baby Matthew. His surgery went well (the doctor described it as “uneventful,” which is a wonderful word when it comes to such procedures.) He is currently recovering in hospital, probably for another few weeks.