Women challenge authorities to #ArrestUs in campaign for abortion reform

A Sydney woman took inspiration from an iconic decades-old stunt when she created the #ArrestUs campaign on Monday.

Less than 24 hours later, hundreds of people had joined her in challenging lawmakers to either finally make abortion legal, or enforce the 119-year-old law that says it’s a crime -- and arrest them for ending their pregnancies.

At the end of July, union organiser Emily Mayo read an article about Wendy McCarthy, a reproductive rights campaigner who took out a newspaper ad in the early 1970s alongside 80 other women announcing they had had illegal abortions -- to “provoke the cops” into punishing them the way poor women regularly were, as McCarthy put it.

On Tuesday, Sydney time, a crucial bill was introduced into the state parliament of New South Wales that would finally remove abortion from its criminal code -- making it almost the last Australian state or territory to do so.

Mayo told Mashable that she met McCarthy at a Sydney action rally in support of the bill, and was struck by how similar the situation is today compared to when McCarthy’s ad was published: privilege allows most people who need an abortion to access one, but the law still keeps it out of reach for some.

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While a person can obtain a lawful abortion in NSW with a statement from a doctor that continuing the pregnancy would be harmful to their health, terminating a pregnancy is still technically illegal -- a woman was prosecuted for self-administering abortion medication in 2017. The current access hinges, as Mayo points out, on a single small piece of case law from 1971, and the stigma and legal uncertainty for both patients and doctors remains to this day.

Using a secret Facebook group, Mayo and others invited people to sign their names and the year or years they had their abortions to the statement, hoping to get at least 10; by the time they launched the campaign on Monday afternoon, they were at 57, whose abortions date from McCarthy’s in 1963 to 2019.

“The more people that speak out, the more people will speak out,” Mayo said. “I just had one-on-one conversations with people I knew and then people they knew and people they kind of knew -- sisters and mothers and community members.”

Mayo said she underestimated the reach the campaign would have and doesn’t have a firm count on how many people have now asked to add their name to the initial list of 56 -- either as an ally or someone who’s accessed abortion -- but estimates that between Twitter and Facebook, it’s now in the thousands. #ArrestUs trended Australia-wide on Twitter by Tuesday morning, and the original post has been shared over 700 times.

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It's reminiscent of the 2015 campaign #ShoutYourAbortion, which aims to destigmatise the decision for women in the U.S. and worldwide.

Mayo, who had her abortion in 2005, acknowledged the privilege of those who are in a position to sign their name to the statement in support of those who can't, and says that the actual risk of legal consequences for those who sign their names is small, but still real.

And that’s the point, she said: Either enforce the law, or repeal it.

“Pass the bill, decriminalise abortion, or arrest us. Arrest us all together, arrest the 56 of us and arrest the thousands of women who have now shared their details alongside us, bring us all together and arrest us. Because we're your sisters, we're your neighbours, we’re in your supermarket. We work with you. We’re at the school gate with you.”

The bill before the state lower house has bipartisan support from over a dozen politicians from both sides of politics, but some resistance is still coming from the expected corners -- including some church groups and socially conservative federal politicians, such as former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who tweeted incorrectly that the bill would allow “a perfectly healthy full-term baby to be aborted because two doctors say it’s ok”.

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“People who say, ‘Oh, why bother with it? Cause you can get an abortion [despite the law]’,” said Mayo. “It's not just a simple thing. It is about the symbolism of what this means for women -- and how can we continue to discuss other issues that matter to me and so many others, like equal pay and women in positions of power and so forth, while in New South Wales, it is a crime for us to exercise a basic medical choice.”

New Zealand's justice minister also announced on Tuesday that the government there would seek to similarly modernise its abortion laws to decriminalise the procedure and treat it "as a health issue".

Debate on the New South Wales bill will continue on Wednesday.

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