Abortion in Queensland – is it what you think?

If you criminalise abortion, what do you expect will happen?

(The Australian) TEGAN Simone Leach was 19, pregnant and “scared” when her boyfriend’s sister arrived in Cairns last Christmas Day with a consignment of contraband tablets and doctor’s instructions written in Ukrainian.

What transpired after Ms Leach allegedly terminated her pregnancy with the abortion pill RU486 and the Queensland police got involved, has unleashed a legal and political storm of the like not seen before in this country.

Ms Leach will face court next month charged with the crime of procuring her own miscarriage, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind to be brought under Queensland’s century-old abortion laws.

If convicted, she faces up to seven years’ jail.

The young man in her life, Sergie Brennan, 21, faces up to 14 years’ imprisonment for attempting to procure an abortion and three years’ jail on a further charge of supplying the means to procure an abortion. [more]

As expected there is quite a lot of anger coming from liberal left sector – with the launch of the Pro-choice Action Collective in Queensland. They have a facebook group and a website. But is this the right case to be defending?

More naked children – for concerned parents

WordPress blogging software handily has internal statistic tracking software.

It’s not always reassuring that “naked kids” continues to be a popular search term redirecting people towards this site. I suppose I can take some pleasure in wasting the time of people who are looking for such photos, and further reassurance comes from most of those search results are not pornography, but often news stories about child pornography.

This story – “Parents face porn claim risk” – was one of the results that appeared. As I clicked through the link, my visitor data will show that I came from a search for “naked children” (can I please be allowed to naively believe that all such hits are of such a nature).

“PARENTS sending family pictures over the Internet could be accused of child pornography under planned new laws, the State Government has been warned.”

I crashed an 18th birthday on Saturday (hey, I knew the lass, I just wasn’t exactly invited). At the party was a photobook/scrapbook that included a single naked-baby photo of the girl – ‘frontbottom’ and all. Obviously included merely for nostalgia and embarrassment purposes. Does this count as distributing child pornography?

The Australian government and public’s reaction to naked children in art recently with the Bill Henson affair has shown a very low (non-existent) tolerance to naked children being percieved as anything else.

The story is from the UK as far as I can tell. But could a similar situation arise through interpretation or extension of Australian laws?

Normally my authorative side is supportive of restricting freedoms to protect heinous crimes such as child abuse. I am generally in favour of removing all forms of corporal discipline to remove any excuse for child abuse in domestic and school settings. But to me this seems excessive on the surface.

Obviously something would need to be found that would separate private distribution of child family snaps, and more nefarious purposes. Allowing distribution between family members to be excused is not a solution – statistics show that abusers are often close family and friends of victims.

Would this be a freedom that families in Australia (or the UK, USA or elsewhere) be prepared to sacrifice to help combat child pornography?

Christian sect called a cult

The “Christian” part must have given it away…

The Brisbane Christian Fellowship (and their Toowoomba counterpart) is in the Courier Mail (“Church sect holds its faithful in grip of fear”, 28/06/08, M. Wenham) and on ABC’s Four Corners. The Christian Fellowship is one of those proliferating fundamentalist groups that pride themselves on devotion (read: mindlessness) and purity (read: xenophobia).

Flick through the 4Corners’ flash site and you can access a tract made by the church to help pubescent teenage girls through “changes” – complete with a section titled “What was Eve’s Deception” and helpful advice like:

Do you want to grow up to be a godly woman who is willing to be given and serve (remember we were created to be a helper) or rather spend your whole life like a sponge, desiring everyone else, (especially a future husband) to fulfil your self-centred needs?

Blessed! What may come if girls actually desire fulfilment?

The Fellowship also appears to be one of those great churches that thinks bad things are God’s way of punishing sinners. After a man suffered a heart attack, induced by the stress of the treatment he received leaving the church, the church actually has the gall to send him a letter, and then read it in church the next Sunday, explaining how this was God’s way of punishing the guy.

Hopefully exposure of groups like this will dispel the myth that Church makes nice people. Though I really doubt anything will come out of this. Australia is just as capable of protecting asshats under the guise of religious freedom as other countries.