Patriarchy and the Breeding Creed- end of semester work.

So every now and then I disconnect from my council duties and focus on my course work for University. Im one of those painful over achieving mature age students who busts her own butt in the efforts to get good marks and keep the academic options open. Rather than just leave the words of this semesters final essay moth balled on a hard drive somewhere I thought I would share my rant on women's reproductive rights being controlled by the patriarchy to support a breeding creed.

I really enjoyed writing it and hope that you enjoy reading it.

This essay aims to discuss periods in history that have had an impact on women’s reproductive rights, to find parallels in a modern context and conclude that further legislative reformation is still hindered by dominant ideologies of patriarchy, nationalism and pronatalism. Australian women have long campaigned for reproductive autonomy the history is complex with different states having different watershed moments. Women since the 1890’s have conducted campaigns for birth control and abortion within a social discourse that is dominantly patriarchal. Fervour for nationalism and pronatalism has either denied women their rights or created a barrier for legislative reform. Campaigns for reproductive rights have been entwined in a meta-framework of disadvantage and have ranged from being the number one issue for women to covert campaigns undertaken with the utmost discretion. This essay adopts the position that abortion is a major part of the contraception debate in Australia. Women’s reproductive rights are intrinsically linked to contraception and abortion.


At the 1975 Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) National Conference polling was conducted to enable prioritization of issues. Abortion/Contraception gained a small percentage and at 13% was certainly not the dominant issue of the day. A general category of women’s issues topped the poll with 42%. Although the poll represents a moment in time it reflects a trend that places the issues of abortion and contraception within the sphere of women’s business and not always as a headline grabbing campaign brief. Abortion has been an option for women wanting to limit their family size since the mid nineteenth century. Some critics, particularly those campaigning from a religious or Right to Life perspective, do not believe that abortion is contraception. Australian women have not passively accepted the gendered roles assigned to them. Since early colonial days women have sought to challenge their position within the colony and to bring to the fore women’s issues. The Suffragette movement which aimed to gain women the vote in Australia is a popular and well documented campaign that achieved its aim in 1902. However campaigning for reproductive rights in Australia from the 1890’s has often gone unreported or has been part of other campaigns that have been more focused on overall women’s rights.

Birth control is an ancient practice that has been and remains dominantly ‘women’s business’. Men have sought and succeeded in controlling the availability of contraceptive aids and hindered women’s ability for reproductive autonomy. Family planning options for men are limited mostly to condom use and sterilization. Methods such as withdrawal are unreliable and abstinence is simply unrealistic in a modern and sexually liberated context. Early contraception in Australia was mostly available to those who could afford it generally the middle and upper classes. Working class earnings didn’t stretch to such ‘luxury items’ as contraceptives. Exhausted women were desperate to control their fertility in an attempt to keep families from poverty and break endless pregnancy and child rearing cycles. The views of women in late nineteenth century Australia were seldom heard in a cacophony of calls for women to fulfill their duty to their Country by rearing many children. The 1903 Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth Rate and on the Morality of Infants in New South Wales (RCDBR) is a defining document of the times and clearly maps the attitudes of the period. The Commission’s report is often quoted and has gained notoriety around the views that are espoused by the committee membership. Made up of seven men representing government, pharmacy and manufacturing the purview of the Commission was to

‘ Make a diligent and full enquiry into the causes that have contributed to the decline of the birth-rate in New South Wales and the effects of the restriction of child-rearing upon the well being of the community’.

Once the Commission met it made application to the government to add to its terms of reference the ability to make recommendations as to the remedies of the ‘various evils’ which are indicated by the evidence as the cause of the decline of the birth-rate and of the high infant mortality’. This clearly indicates that the commission found the very idea of contraception repugnant and ‘evil’. When perusing the list of witnesses the commission called to give evidence there is stark gender inequity with only six women discernible from a list of ninety six. Three of these six women represented Infant homes including the Benevolent Society Institution. Siedlecky and Wyndham describe the NSW Benevolent Society as pronatalist even though the Benevolent Society took this stance the organization was responsible for the death of many children held in its care. Siedlecky and Wyndham could well have quoted directly from the RCDBR report which recognized that deaths in infant homes were exceptionally high and needed a higher level of inspection and control. Close reading of the report leaves the reader no doubt that this period in Australia’s history was very patriarchal and driving a nationalistic, pronatalist agenda that left little space for the views and needs of women. Women who desired to keep their family numbers low conducted their contraception affairs with the utmost of stealth and in fear of the laws which rejected outright the sale and advertising of contraceptive related items. It is little wonder that illegal and poorly administered abortion was rife and that women often resorted to ‘baby farming’ or paying for their infants to be taken away and ‘cared for’ by another.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the need for contraception and abortion was driving women to desperate measures. The literature shows that the patriarchal political position of the day ignored the needs of the female population and fervently supported an agenda of ‘populate or perish’ which described women who limited their families as unpatriotic. This provides us with a parallel situation between 1903 and 2010 where citizens’ actions and attitudes are in direct conflict with the political agenda of the times. Pringle asserts that 80% of the population is supportive of abortion reform yet the political will for change doesn’t match the attitude of the people. Summers also asserts that ‘populate or perish’ has been replaced by a conservative Government driven ideology of a ‘breeding creed’ a ‘powerful new ideology that defines women first and foremost as mothers’.

The pronatalist agenda in Australia has caused great suffering for women who have had to break the law in order to obtain abortions and contraception. The effects of World War One saw an increase in venereal disease in Australia and presented an opportunity for discussion around sexual hygiene. The interwar years were an interesting time for discussion about contraception as the debates were themed around reducing venereal disease and classic eugenics which proscribed limiting birth to those deemed ‘fit’ to reproduce and become the mothers of a strong nation. The proponents of eugenics managed to inculcate further the notion of ‘good’ domesticity and child rearing as national duty through domestic training for girls as part of the education curriculum. The Racial Hygiene Association (RHA) was successful in opening the first birth control clinic in Australia during 1933. Campaigner Ruby Rich confesses that the RHA adopted the name as a means to disguise the ‘threat’ of family planning which was considered ‘socially unacceptable’. Rich was responsible for sending back intelligence on British Birth Control Clinics, which aided the RHA in setting up the Sydney clinic in 1933. During the nineteen thirties the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) were campaigning on a number of fronts that included equal rights for women in pay, property ownership and child responsibility. The CPA also agitated for birth control. Jean Devanny a prominent member of the CPA was often jailed for her rousing speeches on numerous issues and believed that free birth control clinics should be available to women and abortion should be legalised. Devanny advocated sexual liberation for women and was considered a radical for taking this position. The notion was considered scandalous when Devanny pronounced ‘women had the right to enjoy sex as much as men did’. The political context during Devannys’ period of activism was still fiercely patriarchal as the federal sphere of politics was yet to see the influence of elected women, which didn’t occur until 1943.

The release of the contraceptive pill in January 1961 set the scene for the women’s revolution of the seventies. The ‘Pill’ gave women reassurance that they had a reliable and relevantly safe means to control family size. The release of ‘the pill’ was not simply a matter of supply and demand as it raised all sorts of moral and ethical dilemmas for medical doctors. Bongiorno discusses doctors using moral judgment when deciding whether or not to prescribe ‘the pill’ to unmarried women, a circumstance that catholic doctors in particular found challenging. According to Bongiorno, catholic doctors recycled old arguments of ‘infidelity, divorce, materialism, broken homes, delinquency, alcoholism, corruption, licentiousness, and marital disharmony’. The arguments of morality and ethics are a poor disguise for religious dogma, which raises its head some forty years later in discussions around the abortion drug RU486 discussed in further detail later in this paper.

The nineteen seventies are renowned for dominant themes of freedom and revolution. The political landscape, as reported by Sawer, was ready for change and it seems to be a period in history where there was a general feeling of optimism, youth and vitality. The Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) formed and became a well-organised collective of women who were determined to achieve policy reform on issues that affected women. High on that list of early priorities was contraception. Pushing the policy agenda WEL took an academic and direct action approach. Surveying women on their ‘experiences of contraception’ and holding marches such as the 1974 Victorian members march on Parliament with ‘condoms on sticks to protest against the statutory ban on advertising contraceptives’. Early in the formation of WEL the tactic of questioning election candidates revealed patriarchy and lack of knowledge on women’s issues. The importance of the campaign to remove the ‘luxury tax’ on contraceptives, lift the ban on advertising contraceptives and improved access to family planning was made all the more poignant with the revelation of WEL survey results. Women had difficulty in obtaining good advice on contraceptives and ‘more than half said they had suffered from fear of pregnancy at some stage on their lives’. WEL was successful in its aims and brought about legislative reform for contraceptives and family planning, but the ‘battle over abortion was far from won’.

Abortion reform has been slow and suffered from the highs and lows of community interest. More current headlines include the legislative reform case of abortion drug RU486 and the prosecution of young Queensland women who obtained RU486 from overseas and self-administered. Organisations within Australia such Reproductive Choice Australia still campaign for women’s access to legal and free abortion seems to fall on deaf ears in parliamentary structures at state and federal levels. Pringle defines this unwillingness of parliamentarians to raise the abortion issue as an ‘urban myth’ that is based on the false assumption that voters would not support a parliamentarian at the polls should they be supportive of pro-abortion position. This is also based on an assumption that there is a rise in religious practice in Australia. Pringle goes on to outline qualitative research into the opinions of Australian people in regards to their position on the availability of abortion which shows a high percentage of people (not just women) ‘support very liberal access to abortion, and this has been the case for at least 30 years’. Pringle unpacks the moral, political and legal arguments that surround the issue of abortion and points clearly to the conservatism of elected members as the real cause as the inhibiting factor in abortion legislative reform. Reforming legislation brought to the Federal Parliament for RU486 within the Therapeutic Goods Act, was supported by male and female parliamentarians in a vote that reflected the opinions of the population. Although Pringle doesn’t contribute the success of the RU486 debate on the gender balance of the 2004 Federal Parliament, it is noted throughout the article that the general increase of women within the political sphere has helped to readdress gender issues during the last thirty years.

Twenty first century pronatalism is thinly disguised under the new banner of a’ breeding creed’ and Right for Life, a group that vehemently opposes abortion. Right for Life advocates have also developed sexual education programs for adolescents that condone abstinence as a form of birth control. Harking back to an era of patriarchal conservatism Right for Life believes it is taking the ‘moral high ground’ but are teaching outdated modes considered impractical by the Family Planning Association which does not condone an ‘abstinence only’ approach as it is far less effective than a holistic approach to sexuality, relationships and contraception. Reading comments left on youth orientated website ActNow on the issue of sex education it is alarming that Australia as a progressive Country seems to be lagging behind in sex education, a campaign that was perceived to have been won during the 1970s. Conservative publication Quadrant published an article in 2010 declaring that modern day eugenics is all about choosing to abort fetuses that are highly likely to have genetic birth defects such as Down Syndrome. Author Deirdre Little declares that the practice of fetal selection is unethical and gives very little consideration to the quality of life for people born with severe birth defects. Little comes from a position of authority and seems to advocate for ‘life for life’s sake’. As a medical doctor and president of Obstetricians Who Respect the Hippocratic Oath , Little can invoke an argument from authority that undoubtedly would influence current decision makers when faced with legislative reform on abortion issues.

In attempting to appraise one hundred and twenty years of women’s struggles for reproductive autonomy, just the briefest of glances at particular times on the journey reveals that women’s struggles have always been defined within a patriarchal hegemony that still carries notions of nationalism and pronatalism. The modern context has changed the discourse for a new generation creating historical parallels such as the ‘breeding creed’ replacing the ‘populate or perish’ doctrine. Right for Life are modern day pronatalists rejecting abortion as immoral and teaching outdated doctrines for sex education. The sisterhood of the seventies which created the Women’s Electoral Lobby would be dismayed that the campaign wins from the 1970s have not been built upon in a substantial way. Women still do not have full reproductive autonomy and still have to deal with conservative, nationalistic government too fearful of electoral backlash to instigate further reforms.

Bibliography

ActNow , Accessed online October 2011 http://www.actnow.com.au/Issues/Sex_education_in_Australia.aspx

Allen, J., ‘Octavious Beale reconsidered: Infanticide, Babyfarming and Abortion in NSW 1880-1939’, in Sydney Labor History Group (ed), What Rough Beast? The Social Order in Australian History, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1982, pp 111-129. [E-book]

Bongiorno, F. ‘January 1961 The Release of the Pill:Contraceptive technology and the ‘Sexual revolution’’, in Martin Crotty and d Roberts(eds) Turning Points in Australian History, Sydney: UNSWP 2008,pp 157-170 (accessed via e-reading)

Choices Decisions Outcomes accessed online http://www.cdo.net.au/

Ferrier Carole, ‘A ‘Red Revolutionist and Ranter’: Jean Devanny in the Early 1930s’, Hecate Vol.24, no.2 ,(1998) p121-148

Legislative Assembly, New South Wales (1904),’Royal Commission on the decline of the birth rate and on the mortality of infants in New South Wales, Vol. 1 Report, Joint Volumes of Papers presented to the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly [NSW Parliamentary Papers] 4 (second session): 791-853

Little, DT, ‘The Return of Eugenics in Australia’, Quadrant , Vol 54 No.5 , (2010) pp 46-5

Pringle, Helen, ‘Urban Mythology: the Question of Abortion in Parliament’, Australasian Parliamentary Review, Spring,( 2007). Vol.22 (2) 5-22.

Rodwell, G, ‘Domestic science, Race Motherhood and Eugenics in Australian State Schools, 1900-1960’, History of Education Review, Vol.29, No.2, (2000), pp67-83.

Sawer, Marian, Making Women Count, A history of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Australia UNSW Press , Sydney , Australia 2008.

Siedlecky , S and Wyndham D, Populate or Perish : Australian Women’s Fight for Birth Control , Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Australia, 1990.

Summers, Ann. The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia, Random House, 2003.

The Australian Women’s Weekly , Wednesday 17 August 1977, Page 141, Ruby Rich a Fighter for Family Planning. article.http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/51268914?searchTerm=Racial Hygiene Association birth control clinic 1933&searchLimits=l-availability=y


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