I am compelled to write after hearing an early morning ABC RN report addressing the current upper house abortion debate in South Australia (my former home). In desperation it would appear that the Pauline Hanson representative assure upper house representative Michele Lemstick.
Michele Lemstick had sought leave from parliament whilst addressing medical therapy required for breast cancer. Upon hearing about the vote Michele was compelled to drop cancer therapy, go to parliament personally, and with her vote defeat this vile and desperate political strategy. Bravo Michele!
As I absorbed this political patriarchal desperation I was thrown back to my first article written, decades ago in the NSW University student ‘rag’ in the early 1970s. Young, naive, lacking academic training, a single mother with two babies, a part-time waitress with no support… Passion overtook me. I wrote honestly… in my struggle with sexuality and male power (I did not have the insights of such language) my stance was: ‘It takes two to tango!’ Let’s face it folks the bloke has millions of eager live sperms in his penis but it’s the woman’s reproductive system that has to bear the social results and burden of his eager cock when discovering that she is pregnant. I went further. ‘Why is it that blokes do not take responsibility for their live sperms… yes the fertilised egg in the women is revealing life, equally the sperm is doing the same! Use condoms blokes. Get a penis ‘trim’ stopping sperm. Stop developing technologies that are painfully inserted into women and pushing ‘the pill’ down her neck. I did not have the insights, or academic/political language at that stage to go further. If educated, I could have. I wanted to ask the lecturers I attended ‘why are all of the teachers so obsessed with theories of sexuality?’ I told my waitress friends that ‘university is filled with blokes obsessed with sex but not shared responsibilities’.
Now that I am a lot older, I will shock you. The response to my article went on for months. Even the vegetarians entered the debate. An academic wanted me to share his name. I asked him: ‘do you take responsibility for your sperms and eager cock?’. This letter may shock, and we all know, as conscious adults, that social equity and awareness of political power will take the ‘gaze’ addressing abortion, not only as a woman’s responsibility, but also into a larger male dynamic. A waitress is wanting the answer ‘is the sperm equally responsible?’.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
