Writings

A collection of 345 posts

Writings

Women need counselling, not coercion

Pregnancies Don’t Need Support, Women Do Anyone who followed the debate on RU486, and understood the complex politics surrounding it, knew it was coming: a quid pro quo for the Health Minister to soften the blow of losing his powers to deny Australian women access to RU486. It came

Writings

THE RU486 DEBATE: Death by Amendment

As I write, the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial Responsibility for Approval of RU86) Bill 2005 may be sliding towards defeat in the House of Representatives. Designed to undercut 1996 amendments to the Therapeutic Goods Act that have effectively banned RU486 and other abortifacient drugs from Australia, the Bill

Writings

RU486/Mifepristone: A factual guide to the issues in the Australian debate

A joint publication of Reproductive Choice Australia and the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance. Written by Leslie and launched at Parliament House Canberra on 8 February 2006. View the full report here [./RU486-mifepristone-v1-0.pdf].

Writings

To RU486 or not to RU486?

In the next few weeks, the Australian parliament will debate a bill that would let the Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) decide on whether RU486, the abortion pill, could be used in Australia. This has kick started a pretty feisty debate and a strong letter campaign from those who want to

Writings

Lift the Ban on RU486!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but those who’d hoped the giving spirit might have affected the Prime Minister when it came to the abortion drug RU 486 have found their stockings sadly empty. On Tuesday, the Prime Minister emerged from a Liberal party room meeting

Writings

Book Review - Motherhood: How should we care for our children? Moving beyond the motherwars - changing the way we see and act

by Anne Mannne, Allen & Unwin, 2005. Motherhood is the latest in a long line of cri de coeur books by baby-boom women about what is claimed to be the incompatibility of “feminist” ideas about motherhood and female emancipation and their lived experience of motherhood. Like Manne, such authors breathed

Writings

Paternity Fraud or Paternal Discrepancy?

“Paternity Fraud” implies deceptive women cuckholding men into believing children are biologically theirs. But the truth is more complex, and more human. While the DNA paternity test has been around since the early 1980s, it was not until the mid–1990s that the moral panic about what father’s rights

Writings

Beslan’s Terrorists Show the Dark Side of Human Emotions

Damaged children grow up to believe that only violence can change Like most Australians I have been devastated by the unfolding tragedy in Russia. Or perhaps even more so. I have school age children, and like many parents, was overwhelmed with pity for those pacing helpless and unknowing outside the

Writings

Book Review - Call Me Elizabeth and Callgirl

Call Me Elizabeth: Wife, mother, escort A true story by Dawn Annandale (Time Warner 2005). Callgirl: Confessions of a double life by Jeanette Angell (Schwartz, 2005) It’s a big year for books on prostitution, with Call Me Elizabeth and Callgirl only some of the volumes weighing down gender studies

Writings

The Sins of Scholarship

Few academics would have slept through the long-running Australian history wars. Sparked by claims made by retired academic Keith Windshuttle that several prominent scholars – among them Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan – misrepresented or falsified data in order fabricate a version of Aboriginal history consistent with pre-existing political agendas, the debate

Writings

Abortion case could set an ugly precedent

We should not further restrict women’s access to late abortions, writes Leslie Cannold. The charging of Dr Suman Sood for manslaughter and procuring an unlawful abortion in NSW is the first such prosecution in that state since 1971, though it was only seven years ago that two West Australian

Writings

Book Review - After the Party - Jesse Blackadder

After the Party by Jesse Blackadder. Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2005. Jesse Blackadder’s first novel is an exploration of the physical and eclectic social terrain of Byron Bay: Sydney-sider holiday escape and stopover de rigour for the backpacker set. It follows the chain of events set into motion by

Writings

Zealotry trumps humanity in pursuit of dubious cause

There is no end in sight to the painful saga of the long-ago termination of a woman with a foetus diagnosed with dwarfism in 2000. Feeling it has no choice but to defend the principle of patient confidentiality, the Royal Women’s Hospital has decided to seek leave to appeal

Writings

Popular, yes - but is it moral?

It’s been driving me crazy for years, but John Howard’s comments in Parliament early this week about the rectitude of mandatory detention and public support for it, tipped me over the edge. The time has come for some clarity in the minds of public figures and commentators about

Writings

Book Review - Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities

Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities, edited by Stephen Tomsen and Mike Donaldson, Pluto Press, $29.95pb, 254pp, 1 86403 121 2 In his introduction to this collection of academic essays about different aspects and types of contemporary Australian masculinity or, as the authors prefer, masculinities, R.W. Connell notes

Writings

Book Review - Wonder Woman

By Virginia Haussegger, Allen & Unwin, $26.95 It’s hard to read Virginia Haussegger, or to listen to her on radio – as she has been in the last week, plugging Wonder Woman – and not find yourself liking her. In particular, I admire her honesty. Since 2002, when she threw

Writings

Madness in the Method

Start talking research methodology to journalists, and many will run screaming from the room. To be fair, the same might be said of some academics working outside the bounds of history, social or pure science departments. Yet, however technical and dry it seems, researchers working in methodology-driven disciplines know that

Writings

Why We Will Resolve the Conflict Between Work and Family

Workers are demanding better working conditions, and conditions for family life If debate on this page over the last few weeks has made anything clear, it is that motherhood has driven a red-hot stake through the heart of the sisterhood – if such a thing ever existed in the first place.

Writings

Sex and the Teacher: Was Justice Done?

Did unconscious sexism lead to a miscarriage of justice in the case of Karen Ellis? On Thursday, the Court of Appeals threw out the 22 month suspended sentence handed down in November by the County Court and re-sentenced the 37 year old school teacher to nearly three years, 6 months

Writings

Book Review - The Moral of the Story: An anthology of ethics through literature

The Moral of the Story: An anthology of ethics through literature edited by Peter Singer and Renata Singer RRP: $49.95 Over my (far too) many years of studentship and academic employment, I have bought (far too) many books, (far too) many of which have stagnated on my shelves, growing

Writings

School Holidays: Give Us A Break

For me, school holidays are like housework: highly demanding, ever-present and seemingly never done. My problem, in a nutshell, is while I’d be happy to have the kids at home, the demands of my work mean this only sporadically and occasionally possible. Most of the time, I need care.

Writings

Book review: The Catch

by Marg Vandeleur, Penguin. RRP $22.95 Spritely, sure-footed, rich with colour and authentic understanding of place, The Catch by first-time author Marg Vandeleur maintains its innocence and light-heartedness on a potentially chin-dragging topic: the shortage of suitable men for desperately-ticking women. At close to 36, curvaceous and pleasantly placid

Writings

Choice? What Choice?

Women academics under-achieving has nothing to do with biology or inclination Since the middle of January, when he theorised that an important reason for the shortage of tenured female scientists and engineers in American’s top universities and researcher institutions was women’s lack of “instrinsic aptitude”, calls for his

Writings

Book Review - Motherguilt: Australian women reveal their true feelings about motherhood

Ita Buttrose & Dr Penny Adams. Penguin/Viking, $32.95 Motherguilt bills itself as a book in which Australian women “revel their true feelings about motherhood” and one that assists women to “deprogram themselves” from the powerful and unique “epidemic of guilt” experienced by today’s mothers. The strength of

Writings

The bald facts

WINSTON Churchill said that a fanatic was a person who couldn’t change his mind and wouldn’t change the subject. According to the dictionary, a fanatic is a person marked by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm for a cause. At times, some of Australia’s prominent civil libertarians sound like