The ACT government's budget announcement about free abortions being made available from early next year had a touch of the Oprah Winfreys about it.
"You get a free abortion! You get a free abortion! You get a free abortion!"
While it is a worthy initiative, there was less attention given to another aspect of the announcement, getting women to use contraception and use it effectively. And nothing about the alternative - talking honestly and openly to women about the possibility of them keeping their baby and the support that might be available to help them with that choice.
("People accessing abortion services will be able to receive free long-acting reversible contraceptives at the time of abortion, which has been shown to reduce demand for abortion," was among the last lines of the government statement.)
To be honest, I was shocked that in the ACT we offer abortions up to 16 weeks. Four months! A fetus by then looks like a baby. Can yawn. Suck its thumb. Surely four months is only for pregnancies that threaten the life of a woman or when the fetus has no chance of survival? And can we look again at the actual reasons women seek out an abortion because it's usually not because of rape. Studies in Australia and the United States say rape is the reason for about 1 per cent of abortions.
Gynaecology Centres Australia, which has provided termination services since 1998, says there are numerous reasons why a woman may elect to end a pregnancy "but first and foremost among these is the failure of contraception".
That puts women in an invidious position. They were taking steps not to become pregnant and now they need to make the most difficult and complex of decisions.
Other studies regularly come up with the same reasons women decide to have an abortion - having a baby would dramatically change their life (in terms of education, employment and the ability to care for existing children), they couldn't afford to have a baby at that time of their life, they didn't want to be a single mother or they were having relationship problems. Other reasons were they had come to the end of their childbearing years, weren't ready for another child and didn't want people to know they'd had sex or become pregnant. It's never an easy decision.
My fear is that the cultural and social pressures on, particularly young women, the missives from the "My Body, My Choice" rallies, is that abortion is the first and foremost option of dealing with an unplanned pregnancy.
We don't hear enough about the need for more support for women who might want to keep their baby but feel they can't, for whatever reason.
We don't draw a link between the difficulties of adopting a child in this country and the number of abortions happening nationwide.
We can't talk openly about the deep, life-long regret that might come with an abortion because it's too often dismissed as right-wing quackery or religious extremism. It's not. It's real.
We need to get real about measures to avoid the need for abortion.
We need to be clear and tell young women that binge drinking or drug taking can result in riskier behaviour and unplanned pregnancies.
We need to tell young men they must get clear and unequivocal consent from a women before they engage in sex. That it's not only morally the right thing to do, but the law.
I would dearly love this country to have a genuine discussion about how we can reduce the number of abortions in Australia. Because the issue is about more than a placard or a t-shirt.
