The issues of abortion need to be discussed more freely and openly

Two federal MPs have been taken to task for mentioning the unmentionable "A" word.

Health Minister Tony Abbott was accused of being “rash” and “stupid” and told to “shut up” for describing abortion as a national tragedy. He was labelled a “hypocrite” for relinquishing a child to adoption – as though that was an easy thing to do.

And in the Herald Sun Sarah Henderson said Senator Julian McGauran had "lost sight of his role as a member of Parliament" and should be given a “good belting around the ears” for seeking an investigation into the abortion of an almost-born baby girl.

Why is freedom of speech always defended - until that speech questions abortion?

Why shouldn't these MPs – indeed any MPs – speak about such things? They are supposed to defend the powerless, so why not the unborn and, in Abbott’s words, "traumatised young women”?

I hear from these women regularly because of my book Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief after Abortion. Like Ginny from Melbourne: "I would hear a baby crying in my sleep or I would get up thinking I had to breastfeed or just getting up to check on the baby ... No-one prepared me for the years of nightmares, the guilt and the pain." And Susan: "My self-esteem plummeted, I no longer cared about work, I abandoned my studies, and I drank like a fish. One night I found myself sitting in the gutter, drunk and crying, wondering what the hell was happening to me. It was like something in me died the same time my baby died."

Then there was D, from NSW, who described herself and women like her as “duped, lied to, ignored, unloved, unsupported, violated and left for dead.”

Abortion was “the easy way out” – for everyone else – the partner who didn't want to support a child; the embarrassed parents, harsh employer and school – society in general. "Freedom of choice" was a myth – the women felt they had no choice.

Even some pro-choice women’s groups now acknowledge abortion as a “tragedy” and the rate “too high”. If we can at least agree on this, perhaps we can begin to find ways forward that deal with economic and social problems, need for workplace reform, discrimination against women, sexual exploitation and lack of male commitment, which drive women to abortion in the first place.

And how can what happened to the distraught woman who sought the termination of her eight-month unborn baby with suspected dwarfism be seen as anything other than a tragedy?

The woman who, due to cultural superstition and social stigma, believed children with disabilities brought “bad karma” and were a form of punishment was not offered treatment to relieve her mental state. Instead, she was relieved of her baby. Was she told anything about risks including uterine rupture, cervical laceration and infection; or research which shows women with a pre-existing mental condition and women who abort late-term for foetal abnormality are especially at risk of post-abortion trauma?

This case raises serious issues - someone had to try to get them looked at.

Until Senator McGauran's intervention, no one else wanted to touch the case. The Coroner said she had no jurisdiction to act because the baby was “stillborn” and not a reportable death. But the baby was “still” because she had potassium chloride injected into her heart before labour was induced.

McGauran has every right to question the diagnosis of dwarfism – the ultrasound diagnosis was not definitive. "The baby doesn't look small" was a nurse’s note in the records.

The mother did not want to continue her pregnancy. She didn't have to. Labour could have been induced - either way she had to deliver the baby. A live baby could have been delivered rather than a dead one. No one was forcing her to keep the child.

Even the Royal Women’s Hospital’s own legal representative, Mr John Snowdon, told the State Coroner’s Assistant “in theory, at least, the option of vaginal delivery of a living baby was available, with a baby to then be separated from the parents if that was their wish".

Why shouldn't someone - even a politician - ask where we should draw the line? Why shouldn’t we ask difficult questions such as what if the baby had been a week or even a day from birth? Or is an abortion at this stage closer to infanticide? What does it say about the status of people with disabilities if the medical profession thinks it's ok to abort children who are considered too short?

And what kind of a society can do no better than offer women only one alternative: a dead baby?