Olga Konstantinovna, Melbourne
For much of the liberal western world, the over-turning of Roe v Wade was a sensational shock to the system. It was an inconceivable notion that rights could be simply… taken away after centuries of American liberal legitimacy being based upon constitutional defence, and by extension the perceived superiority due to such tightly-protected rights. However, for us it simply confirmed the knowledge that there are no guaranteed rights for the proletariat under bourgeois rule. As Trotsky once put it after October 1905, within bourgeois democracy “everything has been given, and nothing has been given”. There is the perception of protection and yet it is a mirage, a falsehood that tricks the worker into supporting a system that ultimately turns its back upon them.
We are beginning to see this seductive dream of liberal democracy disappear before our very eyes in South Australia. Liberal MP Ben Hood is hoping to amend newly granted abortion laws to ban women after 27 weeks and 7 days from seeking an abortion, for any reason. Such invasive legislature can be seeing as nothing more than a sick trick in order to normalise further cuts to the rights of the worker.
Further, it is a gross reduction of women to nothing more than a womb. Such a law intrinsically implies that a woman’s ability to conceive life is something to be lauded above any matter of mental or physical health, or simply autonomy. Not to mention the ignorance towards the trauma of giving birth. I have often noted in the media a lack of acknowledgement of the genuine mental and physical toll that containing a uterus has upon someone. The dismissal of extreme pain connected to menstruation cycles, and perhaps worse the focus upon the ‘beauty’ of birth rather than the horrors of the extreme toll that it takes upon a person. This legislation perpetuates the idea that birth is simply something experienced for a day, and does not dare to genuinely understand the grief that many women experience as their body is forever changed after pregnancy, the post-partum depression that quietly plagues millions and the inability to ever return to ‘normal’ after one experiences such physical and mental trauma. Hence, we must see this law as a symptom of a society in which we truly have nothing guaranteed.
PARTISAN! 