Overturning Roe v Wade didn’t happen here. But there’s every reason to take to the streets about it

There are two major themes uniting the speakers at Melbourne’s State Library on Saturday, addressing a crowd of roughly 15,000 people protesting the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. The first is a raging solidarity, which frequently turns the speakers’ words to static through the echoing sound system, a rage that becomes almost corporeal, smacking against the buildings on either side of the crowded street. The second is a feeling of contingency, a feeling that a switch can be flicked and decades of work will be erased.

Take, for example, the US government’s “global gag rule” — a block on federal funding for non-government organisations that provide abortion services, counselling or referrals, or advocate for decriminalising abortion or expanded abortion services in their home country. It’s been imposed by every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, switched on and off whenever the ruling party changes.

In Australia, things are different. Talk to anyone who has worked in women’s rights organisations and they’ll tell you the risk doesn’t necessarily come from the ghoulish trolls celebrating the end of Roe v Wade — that group hasn’t succeeded in making abortion rights a mainstream culture war talking point in this country in quite some time. But what is always under threat is access.

“Rights aren’t everything,” Cecilia Judge, health worker and delegate with Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA), tells the crowd. “Someone may have XYZ rights, but it’s about being able to access those rights.”

So if 15,000 seems like a lot of people protesting a court decision affecting a foreign country — not to mention similar protests occurring in Sydney, Perth and other capital cities — consider the following:

Consider the “postcode lottery” in Australia determining whether women can access abortions based on their location and financial situation. Consider that in Western Australia, laws governing abortion still fall under the state’s criminal code.

Consider the saga of abortion pill Mifepristone, or RU486 (detailed in Crikey last week): access continues to be restricted, an echo of the decade-long ban between 1996 and 2006, imposed for craven political reasons by the Howard government to keep anti-abortion senator Brian Harradine onside.

“It only takes one politician” WA Greens Senator and Yamatji-Noongar woman Dorinda Cox tells the Melbourne crowd.

Other speakers reinforce what’s at stake.

“Banning abortions has never prevented them, but what it guarantees is more of us will die in the process,” says sex history researcher and academic at the University of Melbourne Esme James.

Her voice bubbling with rage and sadness, James tells the crowd the brutal reality of what women are forced to do when abortion is criminalised — drinking castor oil or Everclear grain alcohol; bathing in boiling water.

“We need to stand up and let them know, if they try to bring it to our shores, we’ll fucking give them hell,” she says.

As ever, the signs are a highlight: “Keep your beliefs out of my briefs”. “Girls just wanna have fun-damental rights”. My favourite simply read “Supreme Cunt”.

Anneke Demanuele, billed as a student activist and socialist, takes things home, the sound system curdling into fuzz as she leads the crowd in a chant of “Fuck the church/fuck the state/women will decide their fate”. It’s all very, well, student socialist activist, and I briefly think of Matt Canavan’s time as a self-proclaimed communist and Marxist at university, falling out of love with doctrine once his acolytes started attacking John Howard as a racist.

If Canavan was all the abortion rights movement was up against, that might not be such a problem. But, of course, he’s not.