She's a brick ...

Dear Tony Abbott,

As our proud nation’s health minister, I know it’s difficult for you to understand abortion, especially experiencing as you did the turmoil of an unexpected pregnancy in your own youth.

It must have been terribly hard for you to cope with the diagnosis at such a young age, not to mention the incredible physical and emotional side effects that are part and parcel of procreation. Feeling sick all the time is a real drag, isn’t it? I think for me the worst part about being pregnant was the pulsating hormonal hammer that seemed to beat incessantly at the base of my head, making me feel as if I was being dragged backwards through a compression chamber.

Or perhaps you found the slightly schizophrenic feeling of housing two entities in one body harder to bear? And speaking of bodies, isn’t it amazing how much they seem to change just in those first two months? It’s almost as if it’s being taken over somehow - like it doesn’t belong to you anymore but no one informed you that you were being evicted and now you’re not quite sure where to go but wherever it is you’ll be taking a generous helping of side flab with you. Did you feel that too?

I know that my thoughts raced a lot which seemed to make me more tired than usual. But then, as my body temperature had dropped it WAS nice to be in bed because everywhere outside of it seemed so incredibly, deathly cold.

The important thing is that, despite all of these hardships, YOU didn’t succumb to the convenience of fetal murder. You knew what the morally righteous thing to do was and you dragged your tush through all that nausea, moodiness and general searing depression and you popped one out for your country.

Of course, you then gave it away to someone else to keep before reuniting unexpectedly years later (a PR dream) and then discovering your cheating lady friend had actually duped you all that time and that the baby wasn’t actually yours and you’d gone through nine months of gestation hell FOR NOTHING which was actually okay because for fuck’s sake, the kid works for the radical Marxist lefties at the ABC which is just like, super embarrassing.

But, in these morally destitute times we’re living in, at least you can say you bravely walked on the metaphorical sands of reproduction and threw a lone starfish back into the ocean/suburbs of WA while saying, “This one. I can save this one”.

Yours sincerely,
Audrey Apple

A couple of days ago, I went to hospital and experienced what some people call “exercising reproductive rights” and others (Abbott, Family First, a nation in archaic denial) refer to as “heartless, evil baby murdering”.

Whichever term floats your boat is your business. Personally, I will always be a tad incensed by the latter but that’s my opinion. The most obvious difference between the two is that the first is right and the second is wrong. See, I believe in reproductive freedom and autonomy, which is when people are given the right to determine the circumstances of their own reproduction. Others believe in reproductive control and interference, which is when the government makes laws that are shit and unhelpful.

I’m familiar with the following statements: