“the river of souls”

                     

           mizuko kuyō (水子供養) 

 water child memorial

Mizuko Kuyo, a Ritual for Unborn Children
Japanese Buddhist ceremony for those who
have had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion
 

Last year I was interviewed for the documentary film Brazen Hussies (2020, dir: Catherine Dywer). The crew spent a day filming with me. Later, when I saw the edit of my account of an illegal abortion I had in 1968, I found it confronting. For many reasons – perhaps because the inner work I have done around abortion was not incorporated. Or perhaps because it is still an emotional and layered site. So be it. It’s not my film. I accepted the edit - as I felt it was a historically important account of women’s lack of power over our own bodies in that 1960s era.  Then, I happened upon this essay, Brazen Hussies and the weaknesses of the women’s liberation movement by Diane Fieldes in Red Flag (May 14 2021).  It triggered emotions again linked to my memories and trauma. I especially took issue with Fieldes’ factual mis-representation of my illegal abortion and also her simplistic class analysis of it. So I decided to write about it to connect with the deeper resonances of abortion for myself and other women.  Here is Fieldes’ paragraph in full: 

For middle-class women like Jeni Thornley, who is interviewed in the film about her undoubtedly unpleasant experience, an unwanted pregnancy meant going to Sydney and having the abortion at a posh clinic in Macquarie Street once you’d paid £300—the mark of the procedure’s illegality being that you had to go at night instead of during the day. For working-class women, as Communist Party member Zelda D’Aprano outlines in horrifying detail in her autobiography, it meant scraping together a much smaller sum but with much greater difficulty, and surrendering yourself to the hands of a backyard butcher.

 Unfortunately, Fieldes has misconstrued my interview in Brazen Hussies to suit her one-dimensional class analysis. She has no idea of my class origins, my  personal life or the circumstances of my illegal abortion. In fact my abortion was not in a “posh” Macquarie St clinic.  It was at the infamous Heatherbrae Clinic in Bondi; a clinic that operated at night to avoid police raids due to the fact that abortion was a  “crime”; a clinic to which desperate women from all classes across Australia and New Zealand sought an abortion; what’s more, even if my abortion had been performed in Fieldes’ “posh clinic”, what does her dualistic argument offer us in understanding the emotional, traumatic inner space of women’s illegal abortion experience across class? As Simone de Beauvoir  so clearly articulated in The Second Sex (Alfred Knopf, 1949, p. 489):

"it is difficult to imagine abandonment more frightful than that in which the menace of death is combined with that of crime and shame."

In fact Fieldes’ rather crude class based analysis of my “posh” abortion, juxtaposed against  Zelda D’Aprano’s “horrifying...working class abortion” is demeaning to women’s shared, usually traumatic experience of illegal abortion. Moreover, it is the collective, shared experience of women, and our concerted political work, that led to the potent national Women’s Abortion Action Campaign organising across class lines to decriminalise abortion. This act of solidarity ultimately provided access to safe, free legal abortions for women, initially in women’s health clinics (then, later in clinics such as Preterm) right across the country – and to this day. These clinics, like Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, were created specifically to focus on women’s health needs in a broad social and political frame, across class.

Fieldes’ rudimentary class paradigm is one of the reasons I left the Socialist Labour League  in the early 1970s and became more deeply involved in women’s liberation, navigating the feminist maxim “the personal is political”. Subsequently, some years later, I found psychoanalysis, recovery programs and Buddhism to be necessary and vital companions, along with feminism, on the lifelong journey of liberation.

I want to pay tribute to African American writer and feminist  bell hooks (1952-2021) at this point as she discusses feminism in such an insightful way – illustrating her desire to bring feminism to everybody. A recent obituary by Sarah Leonard (2021) bell hooks transformed feminism articulates this clearly:

“More than three decades earlier, in 1984, bell hooks (author and activist) had already sliced through those questions in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Feminism’s aim is “not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all our lives. Most importantly, feminism is neither a lifestyle nor a ready-made identity or role one can step into.”

By defining feminism so precisely in lucid and welcoming prose, hooks issued a challenge to all of us to participate in overturning what she frequently called the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She also provided me with my own understanding of socialism by making clear that you can’t practice feminism while leaving the brutal hierarchies of capitalism intact. She referred in her writing not to the feminist movement but to “feminist movement.” As in, you get up and go....In short, the range of hooks’ work expressed a desire to bring feminism to everybody. It expressed her belief that feminism really could transform the whole world, and that each of us has a part to play” (Subtext, 17th December 2021).

I finish this short piece with another image of the Mizuko Kuyo Ritual for Unborn Children as the abortion experience is profound and also involves spirit. Fieldes’ description of my 1970s abortion in Red Flag stirred up many emotions  – not only because the assertions about my abortion were factually incorrect, but because there is no acknowledgement of the depth of such an intense body/mind/spirit experience - one that unites women in our journey towards liberation. 

Recently I read about this documentary“Mizuko”: Visual Exploration of the Grief & Search for Healing  (dir: Kira Dane &  Katelyn Rebelo); it  explores the cultural, spiritual and personal implications of misuko – holding a memorial service for one’s unborn child. I have appreciated this water child memorial ritual for some years; it is such a healing ceremony that offers a way beyond the sad struggle of the pro/anti-abortion/pro-life debate that plagues our western societies.

   Mizuko kuyō water child memorial service

Japanese Buddhist ceremony for those who have had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion 

Postscript

For the record, Zelda D’Aprano was a sister in the free safe legal abortion struggle, and a colleague. We were privileged to document her equal pay activism in our feature film For Love or Money: the history of women and work in Australia (McMurchy, Nash, Oliver & Thornley, 1983). Distributor Ronin Films