Bulletin from Abroad
Surprisingly, New Zealand could learn something from the American experience on abortion laws.
One of the weirder things about being an expat is the way in which the New Zealand that exists in your head becomes, over time, a shadow of the other
New Zealand, the one that exists in the world. I go back home several times a year; check the news on New Zealand websites; try to keep up with things. Back in 2011, when Kiwis in my Facebook field suddenly started prefacing posts with “nek minnit”, I made the effort to figure out why.
It’s not the same as being there. In many ways, your understanding of the place remains frozen in the moment that you left it. I was reminded of this when watching Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Her “contemporary” New Zealand had something of that trapped-in-amber quality – an echo of the bleaker, blokier New Zealand she left in the 1970s.
I mention this because, in one of my recent trips to Kiwi news websites, I came across a story about whether New Zealand should reform its abortion laws. Every so often, Americans ask me what the deal is with abortion in
New Zealand, and I realise that I don’t precisely know. But my default assumption was that New Zealand’s abortion laws were probably more or less sensible. This is usually a safe guess when comparing NZ-US social policy. But I also assumed that because of the particular moment I left the country – midway through a Helen Clarkled blitz of progressive reforms in the mid-2000s. That’s my mental marker, the unconscious set of memories and references that kick in when asked by an American to explain what New Zealand politics “are like”.
So I was surprised – frankly, horrified – to find how unsensible New Zealand’s abortion laws remain in 2017. Specifically, that they don’t permit a woman to access an abortion simply on the grounds of choice, rather than because of a threat to physical or mental health. As unlikely as it sounds, this may be one area where we could learn something from the American experience.
Abortion is one of the ugliest issues in American political life. Clinics that offer them are targets of bombings and shootings. Running for office as a Republican practically requires the demonisation of women’s lives and choices: in the last election, presidential hopeful Chris Christie accused Hillary Clinton of supporting the “systematic murder of children in the womb to preserve their body parts”. And access to abortion is wildly uneven – obtaining one is relatively straightforward in some states, nearly impossible in others.
But this ugliness has also forced pro-choice advocates to mount an open, unapologetic defence of abortion, avoiding hushed tones and the aura of tragedy.
Their defence is that unwanted pregnancies are a reality of life and that a woman might need to terminate one for many reasons – her health, to avoid economic ruin, for her family’s well-being, because she might be in a better place to have a baby in five years’ time, because she and her partner have two kids and don’t feel ready for a third. “Why can’t a woman just say, ‘This isn’t the right time for me?’” the writer Katha Pollitt argued in her book Pro, which makes the case for abortion as a “social good”.
In recent years, some female politicians have gone beyond defending abortions in the abstract and started talking about their own.
One up-and-coming candidate in Nevada explained that she was the only one of her sisters not to become a teenage mother – because she had an abortion at 16. “I don’t regret it,” she said, “because I am here making a difference.”
New Zealander Rachel Morris is executive editor of Huffington Post Highline.
New Zealand laws in 2017 don’t permit a woman to access an abortion simply on the grounds of choice.