On Tuesday, Mietta Marchingo’s slanderous letter “Abortion no easy choice but still a woman’s right” was published.
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Mietta stated “this type of thinking (Ron McMillan’s) is not about the abortion, it is about misogyny and the oppression of women”.
Mietta, I happen to know that on the day your letter was published, Ron McMillan travelled from Castlemaine to Bendigo and picked up a large fridge from the Anglicare warehouse to help a friend of mine in need.
He removed the old fridge and installed the new one.
While in Bendigo, Ron visited my mother and stayed for a chat.
On his return his neighbour asked if he was free to mind her two young children while she went down the street; she didn’t want to take them out in the heat.
So Ron stayed with the children until her return.
Mietta does this sound like the actions of a misogynist who is out to oppress women?
Of course it does not, because unfortunately for your argument, he is not a misogynist; he is just more informed of the facts.
Mietta, it is blatantly obvious that you do not, and have not known Ron McMillan, and yet four times in your letter you wrote that Ron was “the type of man to...”
This method by which you are attempting to defend “choice” is not uncommon.
It lacks substance and even common decency, as demonstrated by your unfounded attacks.
If you had facts to support your cry of “women’s rights” and “pro choice”, rather the manipulation of language, I’m sure you would use them.
Instead you label your opposition as women-haters and pregnancy as ill health.
The pro-choice lobby often instils fear into the community with images of a bloody coat hanger and fears of an increase in the death rate due to the backyard butcher.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics data on Causes of Death 1906 – 1996 serves to illustrate the dramatic medical breakthroughs made during this period are the real cause of the reduction of deaths from abortion.
The death rate due to illegal abortions dropped dramatically from approximately 100 deaths per year in the 1930s to only one death in 1969 before there was even one legal abortion clinic in Australia.
One death is always one too many.
However, seeing that we still don’t escape death from legal abortions, and considering we still have the memory of the 49 women infected with hepatitis C, the misdiagnosis of the baby aborted for dwarfism, the “termination” of the wrong twin and the emergency dash of a woman from the Croydon abortion clinic to intensive care suffering multiple organ failure... well, that one death, in context, is not much of an argument.
The pro-choice, women’s rights, misogynist rhetoric is seriously undermined when the facts are exposed.
An in-depth study of 1200 Australians by the Southern Cross Institute in 2005 showed 98 per cent wanted information on the health risks of abortion, 86 per cent wanted independent counselling and 94 per cent wanted alternatives.
The community wants real choices, Mietta, not rhetoric. Let’s all acknowledge the facts.
Sandra Caddy,
Castlemaine