I spend an uncommon amount of time in South Australia for a person who doesn’t actually live there; I’d never heard of South Australian Liberal MP Ben Hood until his current private member’s bill to repoliticise abortion in the worst possible way.
Appointed directly by his party to fill a casual upper house vacancy last year, Hood was last before the will of the people when he contested Mt Gambier’s House of Assembly seat for the Liberal party in 2022 and lost. But with an electoral mandate of zero, the MP is now famous – congratulations, Ben – for reinflaming debate on the settled issue of abortion.
I say settled because abortion access remains a political unifier of compelling power in democratic Australia, with no less than 80% of the population consistently supporting reproductive rights. For many years, the electorate was frustratingly ahead of the Australian state legislatures who have legal provenance over the issue. Queensland and New South Wales took until an enraging 2018 and 2019 to decriminalise abortion as per public demand.
To bring its suite of laws into line with community attitudes was precisely why South Australia reformed its own abortion laws in 2021. Hood’s issue is with South Australia’s legal provisions around “late-term abortions”, performed in the third trimester of pregnancy. They amount to barely 1% of all pregnancy terminations and are performed almost exclusively for dire medical reasons, obliging two doctors to formally concur to their necessity.
Hood’s three-page proposed amendment to the bill would mean – and I quote the ABC here – that people in that horrific situation “would be required to give birth”.
Improbably, he goes on: “A medical practitioner may only intervene to end the pregnancy of a person who is more than 27 weeks and 6 days pregnant if the intention is to deliver the foetus alive.” Anything else – quoth someone who is never going to be pregnant and never going to give birth – is “foeticide”.
Doctor after doctor has condemned Hood’s bill. A spokesperson for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) showed remarkable restraint limiting public comments to a declaration that decisions around terminations were for patients and doctors, “rather than being made by politicians”.
Of course, the decision is not going to be made by Hood, who doesn’t have the power of government or anything like a parliamentary majority to crunch his proposal through. Although the Liberals allow a conscience vote on the issue, MPs from his own party were instrumental in changing the law three years ago and MP Michelle Lensink from his own party has been quoted as saying “I think some of my House of Assembly [colleagues] are more angry than I’ve ever seen them.” The South Australian party leader, Vincent Tarzia, said “changing the laws around late term termination is not Liberal party policy”.
The Labor health minister, Chris Picton, denounced it as “an extreme rightwing culture war bill”. And he’s right.
Some may suppose it possible that Hood is just another authoritarian banana inspired by the lethal current madness in the United States into a zealot’s crusade to demand outcomes both cruel and ridiculous. Others may delve a little deeper into the psychology of who supports anti-abortion positions and consider traces of political habit.
Pro-choice bills have always had a harder fight for support in parliaments than electorates because there’s always one or two someones in every party who are squeamish on the subject, whether because of who supports them politically or the traditions and values that have informed their political self-identity.
But what researchers have known for some time about anti-abortion politics is that those who hold them are powerfully disposed to moral absolutism and a profound in-group loyalty that comes to define them socially. They also defer to authoritarian values and adhere to hierarchies of control.
Although this is a minority of the population, the channelled energy of this community, once animated, can be of great political use – for instance, to voluntarily build online disinformation infrastructure that can be switched on and off for other political causes at convenience.
Why the formerly once “very pro-choice” Donald Trump has cleaved the extreme anti-abortion cause to his own political identity, despite its unpopularity with the American electorate, is maybe explained thus, given the tactics he demonstrates. Trump understands – as everyone should – that politics is never as much about winning an issue as it is about winning power.
Whether Ben Hood MP’s mad forced-birth proposals have a broader tactical purpose or not, their only immediate victory has been an uncomfortable reminder to the electorate: while the reproductive rights battle is long won, the culture war around it may never be over.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
