reviews
Thinking intensely about the holocaust, Israel and Gaza
The vengeful, scheming, genocidal response unleashed since October last year in Gaza, by Israel, has prompted a profoundly intensified global review of the punishing history related to the establishment of the State of Israel and its colonial-settler expansion ever since 1948. An exceptional commentator, Pankaj Mishra, has now contributed an avidly argued, candid extended essay Continue reading »
Abortion access still faces barriers due to sexist system
In 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe V Wade ruling that gave the right to abortion constitutional protection, thousands came out in solidarity to protest in Australia.
Long-time campaigner for abortion rights Barbara Baird hoped that those demonstrators were also showing concern for the need to change the conditions under which abortion is available here.
Baird has written extensively on abortion law and politics. In this book, she examines the state of abortion provision in Australia in a history of reproductive health since 1990.
The book incorporates extensive interviews with health professionals, activists, journalists and patients who are presented as “champions” for their dedication to what can be a politically dangerous field; most must remain anonymous.
Significantly, she argues: “The battle for affordable, accessible, and appropriate abortion care in Australia is far from over.”
The concept of battle creates an impression that the issue is evenly polarised and extremely controversial. Yet the majority of people support abortion rights.
Even in the US about 70 per cent of the voting population (and 74 per cent among young people) support abortion rights, according to recent ballots and opinion polls. In Australia the figure is around 75 per cent.
Abortion is a safe simple procedure when performed by trained practitioners. Yet, from the 1800s in Australia abortion was deemed a crime and then the laws were liberalised in the 1970s and 80s.
Decriminalisation, beginning in the ACT in 2002 and then finishing in WA in 2023, improved the situation by removing abortion as an offence under the criminal law. Pregnant people can request an abortion without doctors’ approvals in the first trimester.
Many people think the legal hurdles are a thing of the past. However, even in Australia abortion access is far from ideal.
Unfortunately, the laws also create legal certainty for those who would restrict the provision of abortion. Anti-abortion politicians took the opportunity in parliamentary debates to shape the legislation. A range of unnecessary restrictions, like lengthy consultation periods and special conditions for abortion provision beyond the first trimester of gestation were codified in laws.
Despite the gains, abortion remains the only health procedure affected by religion, stigma and shame for doctors, midwives, nurses and patients.
Baird helps us understand this conundrum but doesn’t have an adequate explanation for what causes this situation and how to win the demands we agree on – free, safe abortion on demand.
Baird writes from the perspective that “the person with an unwanted pregnancy should be at the centre of our thinking about abortion”. This analysis reveals that the way the laws are applied to the inadequate underfunded reproductive healthcare industry, creates confusion and precarity for pregnant people.
A special form of healthcare
Statistics are incomplete in Australia, but about one-third to one-quarter of women will have to seek an abortion to protect their health and well-being. Yet many pregnant people will find access to abortion impossible because of cost, lack of facilities and doctors.
Baird correctly argues that the privatisation of health services, which accelerated with the rise of neoliberalism, is a driver for undermining Australia’s crisis-prone underfunded healthcare system, including all reproductive health services.
She situates abortion services as part of the broader system, an industry controlled by federal and state government regulation which fails to provide an adequate service.
While government hospitals perform abortions in some Australian states (especially South Australia and Northern Territory) most are provided in private clinics.
Many pregnant people find themselves in a federally funded Catholic Church-run private hospital. Because these institutions adhere to anti-abortion principles that do not allow most reproductive health services, especially abortion, they effectively ban all pregnancy terminations despite the legal environment.
Greens senator Larissa Waters stated: “This… would not be accepted if it were any other area of health care… It is outrageous that private hospitals receiving public funding denied healthcare to pregnant people in need.”
Doctors are not compelled to perform abortions, although they remain the only legally sanctioned abortion practitioners. All healthcare workers can claim a conscientious objection and refuse to perform a range of reproductive health services, although legally they are expected to refer patients to non-objecting professionals.
Abortion doctors and providers are limited to finding cracks in the public health system and establishing their own private clinics usually without state support. Without adequate public hospital resources, quality training remains difficult to obtain.
The private sector, dominated by MSI Australia (British company Marie Stopes) partially fills a huge gap, but at a cost to patients.
However, the priority for private businesses is profit rather than quality patient care. Even not-for-profit clinics, like MSI Australia, are geared to make a surplus to invest in new businesses. Medicare allows a rebate which partially allays some costs of patients.
While most discussion of discrimination regarding abortion service availability refers to a “postcode lottery”, the needs of Indigenous, migrant, poor, intersex, trans, disabled and younger people are often disregarded.
Baird explains the myriad ways people are denied what should be a human right, saying: “Based on the economics and geography of access alone, the system creates reproductive injustice for about one-third of all people who have an abortion, and for all those who have no choice but to continue an unwanted pregnancy.
“These are often people who are already severely marginalised by poverty, geography, isolation, youth, lack of internet literacy or connection, lack of Medicare entitlement, violent and coercive relationships, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, and by abortion’s own internal ‘other’: presenting ‘late’.”
What is labelled “late” abortion especially after 20 weeks’ gestation also features in the discussion about which bodies are deserving and which not. Baird says: “The fact that only a small number of people need late abortions is no reason to allow governments, hospitals and the medical profession to deny them reproductive justice.”
Abortion, oppression and the state
The book raises important questions about the role of the state in imposing unnecessary laws and reinforcing gender-based and racist stereotypes, which has contributed historically to the denial of adequate reproductive health services.
In a colonial settler state like Australia, abortion laws were initially ideologically directed overwhelmingly to white women in the interests of maintaining the white population. Indigenous women and people with disability suffered forced sterilisation and child removal.
Today oppressed groups such as Indigenous people face poorer access to abortion and other health services.
In the early 2000s the Howard government acted to prevent the import and availability of the abortion pill RU486, which had been available in France since the1980s.
The state continues to frame the circumstances for access to abortion with both law and industry regulation.
Baird argues: “This book understands the issue of access to abortion care through a framework that feminists in the USA have called Reproductive Justice. This is a set of principles that sees human rights for all, regardless of age, ability, class, race, sexuality or gender, as inclusive of the right to continue or not with pregnancy, to be supported in providing a safe and nourishing environment in which to raise children, and to have access to adequate health care.
“The book focuses on abortion in the context of the full range of reproductive issues. It aims to contribute to the achievement of reproductive justice.”
While this analysis provides an important description of the situation we face today, it does not explain the cause of injustice and how it benefits capitalism.
Women’s bodily autonomy is restricted in the interests of gendered norms to facilitate unpaid labour bringing up the next generation of workers, producing gendered oppression.
Other forms of oppression—racism, disability, homophobia, transphobia—generate other forms of discrimination as part of ruling class strategies to divide the working class and anti-capitalist social movements.
The roots of women’s oppression lie in the nuclear family, which as a capitalist institution is part of the social structure that shapes women as carers of children.
Abortion rights are restricted because they limit the state’s control over fertility and the role of the nuclear family to reproduce labour power cheaply.
Yet we have won reforms and some reproductive rights.
Baird does not draw out the nature of the state and the system as capitalist.
Yet, this situation reveals an important contradiction for capitalism—the capitalist economy also requires women’s labour. Thanks to the struggle by trade unionists, the Australian state recognises women’s right to work and equality.
The government and the bosses want it both ways—women who work are expected to also prioritise caring responsibilities. During the early days of the COVID pandemic governments accepted that women increased their child caring role in the home as schools closed.
Post Roe V Wade in the US major capitalists are playing a double-edged game—Amazon offered financial support for employees who needed to travel to access legal abortion but also donated to anti-abortion and the right-wing campaigns for total bans on abortion.
The contradictions in social policy and practice can help activists recognise strategies for change. The ACT government announced last year that abortion would be provided free of charge during the first 16 weeks, showing that such reforms are possible everywhere. Medical abortion, which involves using two abortion pills during the first nine weeks, is becoming more widespread, especially where there are telehealth facilities.
This contradictory situation reflects the problem for capitalism – who will pay for social reproduction? The working class families or the capitalists?
The capitalist class is unwilling to pay and relies on oppression to create and reproduce labour to produce society’s wealth in exploitative relations.
Abortion restrictions are part of the system of exploitation and oppression. They are a reminder that, for women, caring for current and future generations of labour is their key role.
For most of human history gender oppression and racism did not exist.
Abortion rights were won in Anglophone countries in the 1970s, with the rise of women’s liberation movement campaigns which were part of widespread mass struggle. The working class played a much bigger role and industrial action often underpinned political struggles. Unions were won to support the campaigns for equal pay and abortion rights.
Today the union movement is dominated by women workers who have raised a series of demands for better working conditions, like paid parental leave and paid menstruation leave.
The NSW government employees enjoy paid leave in the event of miscarriage and for fertility treatment.
It’s time to achieve leave for all reproductive health, including abortion, when needed.
Abortion has always been more than a women’s issue, it affects all genders, men and women, gay and straight, people of colour and white, and we are strongest when we fight unitedly in our workplaces.
Fight for free quality reproductive healthcare
In Australia abortion rights are enshrined in new decriminalised legal structures, although they remain inadequate. Significantly, the under-resourced reproductive healthcare system means large numbers of pregnant people cannot realise these limited rights.
Despite the state’s oppressive role, Baird correctly calls for free publicly-funded universal quality healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, Australia-wide.
Our immediate target should be the federal Labor government. Before the 2019 federal election the Labor Party promised that, if elected, the Commonwealth-state hospital funding agreements would “expect termination services to be provided consistently”.
That pledge was dumped before the 2022 election and the results of a new Senate enquiry do not go far enough. Greens senator Larissa Waters called on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to “revert to Labor’s 2019 policy of requiring private hospitals [including the Catholic Church-run hospitals] to provide abortion care as a condition of receiving public funding”.
These demands are realisable in a wealthy country like Australia. For a fraction of the billions spent on fossil fuel industry subsidies and nuclear submarines, the government could fully fund reproductive healthcare.
Capitalism allows space for anti-abortion governments, bigots and the far right which are a threat in many countries, and also for limited abortion rights like most recently legislated in France where President Macron has said he “wants to make women’s freedom to choose an abortion ‘irreversible’.”
Therefore, the struggle for abortion rights will continue.
So that everyone has a real choice whether to give birth or not, governments should guarantee full access to free, safe, reliable and culturally appropriate contraception and abortion on demand, as well as services for safe childbirth and the raising of children.
Baird never forgets the need for activism and argues that abortion rights are won through political struggle. Her work is essential in the toolbox for activists.
Working class struggle was necessary to push back the anti-abortion right recently in Ireland and Argentina, where abortions are now provided free and safely as part of the public health systems.
Such a struggle is possible because in most countries a large majority supports abortion rights. The working class can be mobilised to win change as shown in our own history in Australia.
By Judy McVey
Barbara Baird, Abortion Care is Health Care, Melbourne University Press (2023).
The post Abortion access still faces barriers due to sexist system first appeared on Solidarity Online.
The Hunger Artist
“I watched my body shrink in the mirror,” Clein writes, “proud to discover how powerful my mind was.” I know the feeling....
A welcome new approach to economics
“The Alternative: How to build a just economy” by American author, Nick Romeo, that has been published by Basic Books UK in recent weeks, is a welcome arrival to a human world in crisis. The Professor of Economics at the University of London, Ha-Joon Chang, says of the book “TINA (There is No Alternative)” has Continue reading »
A Jazz Age Mystery in a Reimagined America
A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.
When morality and loyalty pull in opposite directions
What to do if morality and loyalty pull in opposite directions: A review of Nicholas Jose, The Idealist The 2023 blockbuster movie Oppenheimer broke box office records in Australia and garnered many Academy Awards. The biographical thriller features a conflicted hero, physicist Robert Oppenheimer. At the first atomic bomb explosion in the American desert, Oppenheimer Continue reading »
Presentation and Power
The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.
The Giggle - Reviews
The Evening Standard<\/a> described the episode as one of the best ever
Social media satire, a killing spree to the Spice Girls and a Doctor literally coming apart at the seams... This was genuinely brilliant and thrillingly unpredictable TV
It has been a long time since Doctor Who has felt this exciting, this funny, this rich, this camp, this smart, this scary, this, well, sublime. Ncuti Gatwa’s charismatic new Doctor, who made his debut tonight, suggests the future is bright for the sci-fi series.
Collider<\/a> also paid tribute to the returning showrunner
The Giggle, is Davies at his best. This episode is both terrifying and hilarious. It's heart-pounding and emotional to watch the Doctor face his oldest adversary while he fights to protect the people of Earth that he can't help but love despite never being able to say the words
For The Telegraph<\/a> the episode was a magical trip across the Whoniverse.
This was always going to be a moving finale. It’s marvellous to have Tennant back – and we may see him again. But, as seen in that prolonged glimpse of Gatwa’s new Doctor, more exciting times really do seem to be afoot. Roll on Christmas Day.
It was no surprise, though, that Neil Patrick Harris was a scene-stealing romp, revelling in silly accents, closeup card magic and imaginative cruelty.
The bursts of fury, the moments of melancholia, the hugging, the brainy specs… If this really is the last time Tennant ever dons the skinny suit, these three specials might be the most triumphant final appearance of any Doctor to date.
And Games Radar<\/a> paid tribute to Catherine Tate, returning as Donna Noble
Donna has also aged, but she's only grown warmer, wiser, and more determined. A scene where she faces off against one of the Toymaker's traps is laugh out loud funny as she unflappably deals with a monster in a wonderfully straightforward way.
Have your say on the episode of the Doctor Who News Facebook page<\/a>
Doctor Who returns for a Christmas Day special and a new series in 2024
The Geopolitics of Godzilla
Published by Japan Forward 30/11/2023
The year is 1947 and Godzilla is on the rampage in Tokyo, chewing up train carriages like candy bars. Japan is controlled by the American Occupation forces, but General MacArthur refuses to intervene for fear of inciting a military showdown with the Soviet Union.
The Self Defence Forces have yet to be created so the country is institutionally helpless. If Japan was at zero point in 1945 and 1946, now things are worse. It’s at “zero minus one”.
“The war is not over,” says our hero, a chap called Koji Shikishima. We know he’s not a very heroic hero because of his behaviour two years before. A kamikaze pilot sent out to die a glorious death, he decided to ignore his instructions and fly onward to the island of Otoshima instead.
That was an unfortunate choice of refuge, as all Godzilla nerds will recognize. This particular (fictional) isle in the Ogasawara chain has been the monster’s home territory since the first movie in the series hit the screens seventy years ago.
Shikishima does much worse than aborting his suicidal mission. Frozen with fear, he cannot muster the willpower to use his machine gun on Godzilla who has emerged from the centre of the island intent on mayhem. Result: nearly all the Japanese servicemen stationed on the island are killed.
Back in Tokyo, he suffers from flashbacks and survivors’ guilt and is unable to respond to the super-attractive woman with whom he shares a rickety shack in Tokyo’s burnt-out ruins.
What he needs is a chance for redemption. Indeed, that is what everybody wants – and Godzilla gives it to them.
In the words of writer Ian Buruma, Godzilla is “a very political monster”. The very first film in the series – still the scariest, despite the primitive technology of the era – was made in 1954, shortly after the “Lucky Dragon” incident. The so-named Japanese fishing boat was caught in the fallout from an American H-bomb test on Bikini Atoll, sickening the crew, one of whom died, and stoking anti-war and anti-American sentiment.
In the early 1970s, when pollution scandals such as Minamata disease had become a national scandal, Godzilla turned saviour, battling a nastier monster called Hedorah, after the Japanese word for sludge. “Godzilla vs Hedorah” (1971, directed by Yoshimitsu Banno) also offers an interesting glimpse into the psychedelic disco culture of the time.
Big G takes on the king of slime
Godzilla films reflect the era in which they were made, its fears and hopes and desires. That is still the case in the twenty first century. Anyone watching “Shin Godzilla” (2016, directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi) could not help but be reminded of the devastating triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that hit Japan five years before.
Particularly salient was the scene in this movie in which the hapless prime minister denies that the strange turbulence in Tokyo Bay is caused by some kind of creature. At that very moment, Godzilla chooses to surface.
Substitute nuclear meltdown for monster and you have what happened to Prime Minister Naoto Kan of the Democratic Party of Japan when he denied that reactors in Fukushima were in a critical state just before the roof blew off one of them on live TV.
In the film, the Prime Minister and several senior government figures are killed when Godzilla smashes their helicopter. Far more troubling, the United Nations gives Japan an ultimatum. Dispose of the monster promptly or leave it to the members of the Security Council – who will use nuclear weapons to neutralize the threat.
In “Shin Godzilla”, Japan is a weak and friendless country, led by mediocre politicians whose first instinct is to cover up unpleasant realities. Maverick thinkers, like Goro Maki, the scientist who predicted the coming of Godzilla, are condemned to obscurity. Not that the Americans are much better: when he was working for the U.S. “Department of Energy”, they prevented him from releasing his findings.
The people who take down Godzilla
Facing the prospect of their country being nuked for a third time in history, Japan’s young bureaucrats and scientists work like demons to come up with a solution. Fortunately, Maki’s notebooks have been found, though not the man himself, who appears to have committed suicide. Nonetheless, his legacy of counterintuitive ideas is enough to save the day.
In the end, Japan manages to regenerate itself, as it always does – in Godzilla movies and in real life. And so, of course, does Godzilla.
Interestingly, “Shin Godzilla” was praised by the late Shinzo Abe who was half-way through his stint as prime minister when it opened. He particularly appreciated the “cool” depiction of the Self-Defense Forces, who play a large role in defeating the monster.
Less impressed was Abe’s longstanding rival in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Shigeru Ishiba who, half-jokingly, claimed that the deployment of the Self-Defense Forces, as shown in the film, was unconstitutional.
If Godzilla represents our worst nightmares, it is no surprise that such issues should enter the conversation. After all, Japan has three nuclear-armed, somewhat hostile countries as near neighbours. China, Russia and North Korea could be considered three Godzillas, a large one, a medium-sized one and a small but vicious one.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came as a particular shock to Japan as it put paid to delusions about the U.N. and indicated that might is still right in the international arena. Notably, there has been almost no pushback against the government’s plan to double defence spending, and Japan’s armament manufacturers are already forecasting bumper profits.
This is the context in which the latest Godzilla movie has been made. Director Takashi Yamazaki has set it in the 1940s, but with one eye on the world of today.
The civilian volunteers who band together to subdue the monster are mostly war veterans, but none of high rank. They are led by a good-humoured and pragmatic former Naval captain who wears his peaked hat during the final battle. The eccentric boffin with a wacky hairstyle who devises the anti-Godzilla plan was also in the Navy, where he worked as developer of marine weapons.
A key element in his strategy is the prototype of an advanced fighter plane, the Shinden, which never flew, Japan having surrendered before it was ready for action. Unlike Otoshima Island, the Shinden actually existed, though no photos or traces of it remain.
It might have looked like this…
Noticeably, there is no mention of the Imperial Japanese Army, and references to the lost war are dark and cynical. According to the volunteers, the fight against Godzilla is not a fight to the death, as the Pacific War was described in the propaganda, but a fight for the future.
Specific mention is made of the extraordinary waste of human life that the wartime military leaders were willing to tolerate and even encourage. It was typical, one man recalls, that they didn’t bother to have ejection mechanisms installed in planes.
In contrast, the slogan of of anti-Godzilla coalition is “resist and survive”. The leaders explain the risks frankly to potential members and tell them they are free to leave with no hard feelings. Several take that option. Later, others with no military experience ask to be allowed to join the noble cause.
In other words, they are not very different from today’s Self Defence Forces, as lauded by Abe. In a struggle against an awesome foe, what kind of weapons do you want? The most advanced available, such as the Shinden. What kind of leader do you want? A calm, authoritative figure like Captain Tanaka. Your personnel? Professionals with high morale.
Tanaka: a born leader
Director Yamazaki makes a small but important change to the story of Godzilla’s creation. By showing the monster causing mayhem in the last months of the war, he breaks the link with nuclear weapons, which were yet to be tested anywhere near Japan or used. Yes, Yamazaki’s Godzilla may have powered up in 1947 when the Americans started nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll, but he cannot serve as metaphor for nukes.
Rather, he becomes a metaphor for all possible forms of human destructiveness. He was there all along, and he will always come back.
Japan finally seems ready to accept the implications of that reality.