Babette Francis's Order of Australia

Mrs Babette Avita Francis, founder of Endeavour Forum, was named a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia (General Division) in the Queen's Birthday 2022 Honours List on June 13. The citation for her honour reads: "For significant service to the community through a range of roles".

Her roles, both in Australia and overseas, are too numerous to be summarised adequately in a single article. She has been a writer, broadcaster and advocate for the unborn, and spoken in many forums, including sessions of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the United Nations.

Babette is originally from India, where she was born in 1930 and lived for the first 22 years of her life. She completed Honours in a Bachelor of Science degree, specialising in microbiology and chemistry. She vividly remembers the painful 1947 Partition of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan.

In 1953, she met her future husband, Charles Francis (1924– 2009), when, in Bombay, she boarded the ship on which he was sailing from Australia to England. Charles was then a returned serviceman and an up-and-coming barrister, who would later become a QC and sit as MP in Victoria's state parliament. In 2003, he too was honoured with the Order of Australia.

Within a fortnight of meeting, Babette and Charles were engaged to be married. The wedding took place not long afterwards at the Brompton Oratory in London.

Because of the then White Australia policy and Babette's Indian birth, Charles could only initially obtain a five-year entry visa into Australia for his new bride, who has now been here for almost 70 years. Charles and Babette later named their Toorak family home Stratheden after the P&O liner on which they met.

Charles and Babette raised eight children (four girls and four boys). Today Babette, has more than 20 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. In January this year, one of her daughters, Professor Prue Francis, received the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours for her pioneering work in oncology and medical education.

As well as raising a family, Babette worked as a part-time freelance writer and for 10 years hosted a program on Radio Australia entitled "Australian Diary", which was broadcast to Asia and the South Pacific. Her articles have appeared in Australia's Quadrant magazine, News Weekly, AD 2000, Family World News, Fidelity, Melbourne's Herald Sun, and America's conservative online journal, Public Discourse.

In 1979, Babette founded Endeavour Forum, Inc. (originally called Women Who Want to be Women), a pro-family, pro-life non-government organisation (NGO) with special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC). For decades Endeavour Forum has held annual NGO "Parallel Events" on pro-life issues at the UN in New York, until March this year, when, along with other pro-life NGOs, it was barred from further participation in sessions of the CSW.

Babette remarked at the time: "I look back with pride on Endeavour Forum's long history of involvement at the United Nations, and I am outraged at this assault on our rights and our legacy."

Over the years Endeavour Forum has hosted many distinguished guest speakers, including churchmen such as Cardinal George Pell, Bishop Peter Elliott, the Rev. Dr Mark Durie and American pro-life advocate Pastor John Anderson; important Australian identities such as John Howard, Tony Abbott, Tim Fischer, Peter Costello, Kevin Andrews, Eric Abetz, Matt Canavan, Denise Cameron, Anne Lastman, Mrs Jan Kronberg, Cory Bernardi and Prof. Augusto Zimmermann; and, from overseas, Dr Allan Carlson and Don Feder (of the World Congress of Families), Steven Mosher (of the Population Research Institute), David and Linda Schlueter (law lecturers at St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas), Nikolas Nikas and Dorinda Bordlee (of the Bioethics Defense Fund in the USA), Rebecca Hagelin (American social commentator), Denise Mountenay (founder of Canada Silent No More, and a key figure in Together for Life Ministries), and Alex Schadenberg (international head of the Canadian-based Euthanasia Prevention Coalition).

It is noteworthy that Babette's guest speakers have included people of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths.

Babette herself has been a regular speaker at America's Eagle Forum, Human Life International world conferences in the USA and Canada, and the World Congress of Families in Prague and Geneva. In October 1995 she was invited by the Pontifical Council for the Family to chair the English language group's discussion at the Third World Congress of Pro-Life Movements, held in Rome. She is also the Australian representative of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer.

Her international awards include receiving the U.S. Eagle Forum's "Homemaker of the Year" for Australia (1988), the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation's "Motherhood Award for 1991", and the World Congress of Families Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Many women have acknowledged that, but for Babette, they would never have got involved in public life. One of her oldest friends, Mrs Margaret Butts, recalls the occasion she and the late Mrs Prue Oldham first met Babette. She said: "We went along to hear her speak at a meeting, and we were so enthralled at what she was doing. And, because she had eight children, we thought, 'Well, gosh, she needs help.' So we decided we'd go and ask her if we could do her shopping and maybe do some work for her around the house.

"No, she didn't want that! She wanted some others to be with her. And so, before we knew it, we were ordered to go overseas and take her place after two weeks that she had been there.

"We were really young bunnies. But it's just been a wonderful experience for me. It's opened the whole world of other meetings."

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