The F Collection: Women’s Abortion Action Campaign

From the WAAC facebook page

My latest on the F Collection is up. This week it’s on WAAC, the Women’s Abortion Action Campaign. They’ve been campaigning in Sydney for 40 years, and have had some incredible achievements.

My post also includes a brief intro to the politics and law of abortion.

An excerpt:

Though some women claim it is possible to be a feminist and to be anti-abortion, bell hooks, feminist, anti-racist activist and scholar, puts a counter argument:

The abortion issue… called the (US) nation’s attention to a woman’s body as no other issue could have done. It was a direct challenge to the church… While it is possible for women to individually choose never to have an abortion, allegiance to feminist politics means that they are still pro-choice, that they support the rights of females who need abortions to choose whether or not to have them.

This point was brought home to me when walking to an International Women’s Day event recently, I stumbled across a prayer circle chanting loudly outside the Preterm Foundation in Surry Hills. The prayer group held models of fetuses suspended in air, with no woman attached, as though these fetuses were somehow separate to the lives of the person bearing them.