ENDEAVOUR FORUM HERALD SUN ARTICLES - BABETTE FRANCIS

 

 

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GHOSTS OF THE ELECTRALL ROLL

HERALD SUN, 01 SEPTEMBER 2004

BABETTE FRANCIS

THIS election campaign will be haunted by ghosts—the empty spaces created by the 100,000 babies aborted each year In Australia for the past two decades. 

These are the ghosts on the electoral roll—those whose youthful energy, enthusiasm and inventiveness we have lost forever. 

Australia is heading down the same grey, dimming and diminishing future as Europe—and Japan—where, in one region because there are no kids, cardboard manikins of children have been placed to cheer up the shopping centre. 

Within the Coalition there is some recognition of the moral and economic implications of this generational genocide. 

Health Minister Tony Abbott is troubled and has raised the issue of abortion without being prompted. 

Treasurer Peter Costello has encouraged couples to have three children – “ one for the husband, one for the wife and one for the nation", and has put money behind the policy by providing $3000, rising to $5000, on the birth of each baby. 

He knows this is a very smart investment because pensions and health benefits for retirees cannot be funded from a diminishing worker base. 

Prime Minister John Howard wants to lift the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate for those over 65. 

But from the ALP there is no sympathy for our lost babies and no attention to the financial consequences of demographic disaster. 

When questioned about the abortion film My Foetus, Opposition Leader Mark Latham said he was "not interested". 

He didn't even bother trotting out the rhetoric about women's rights. 

Why isn't he interested? 

He Is a great advocate of reading to children, but one must first have children before one, can read to them. 

Mr Latham seems unaware that Australia's birth rate is now 1.75, so that in many families there will be only one child not the "children" he imagines are available to be read to. 

He also rejects lifting the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate for over 65s, while research for Carers Australia by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling forecasts the number of elderly in Australia likely to need assistance will rise from 539,000 In 2001 to 1,390,000 In 2031, an increase of 160 per cent. 

As the average age of carers is also increasing, there may not be enough carers for those who need assistance. 

When Mr Latham's age group reaches retirement, he may wish he had helped the elderly to provide better for their declining years. 

The ALP's divorce from reality is shown in the comment by Victorian Health Minister Bronwyn Pike that "high abortion rates could partly be blamed on a stalled push for female empowerment". 

For decades the feminist push for empowerment had as its chief goal abortion on demand, now enshrined in the ALP platform. 

In contrast, Dr Joseph Chamie, chief demographer in the UN's population division, told a recent population conference gender equality is part of the problem associated with declining fertility. 

The ALP's blinkered view on abortion may be because it has fallen for the feminist party line (as articulated by doctors Lachlan de Crespigny and Julian Savulescu in the Herald Sun last week) that a fetus is not a person because it cannot exercise choice and does not feel emotions such as anger. 

Actually a fetus can choose if sugar is added to the amniotic fluid it swallows' more. If a bitter substance is added, the fetus swallows less. 

And a fetus hears --  I shop near a railway station, and every time a train siren sounded, my baby in utero would jump. 

I don't think a fetus gets really angry, but mildly annoyed, certainly. 

At night in bed if my fetus was not comfortable, it would kick until I turned over and adjusted my position until it was comfortable. 

The luckless fetuses of the '80s would love to vote on October 9 if they could.

 

 

babette@endeavourforum.org.au

 

BABETTE FRANCIS is co-ordinator of the Endeavour Forum, a counter- feminist, anti-abortion group

 

 

Member Organisation, World Council for Life and Family

NGO in Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC of the UN