If it bleeds, it leads.

In the swamp that is a commercial television newsroom I am something of a bottom feeder. I am quite happy to show up once or twice a week to do my insignificant job for an insignificant amount of dough.

The newsroom, if nothing else, has made me a nervous mother. One occasionally hears or sees details that will never make it to the six o’clock news and it is these tidbits which have arranged themselves into an un-fun show-reel in my imagination.

It’s like getting to adulthood and still having a monster under the bed, several, in fact.

Headlining my show is an eleven-year-old boy roller-blading behind his brother on the way to the shop. Somewhere along the way he is snatched, fifteen days later he is found dead.

During the course of this story unfolding I was corralled into an edit-suite by the then newsroom director, a man I was so mindful of I had installed a rear vision mirror next to my computer lest he should appear anywhere outside of my peripheral vision. He had a special talent for materialising behind me just as I had been saying dreadful things about him. For the purpose of this story I shall call him Ratings Man.

Ratings Man had me pegged as someone typically representative of a commercial television news target audience. An audience known affectionately by journalists as mouth-breathers, inbreds and oxygen-thieves. I had been invited into the edit suite to watch the opening shots on a story about the missing boy. Ratings Man wasn’t particularly interested in what I thought; he wanted to see what I did. I watched the story and Ratings Man watched me.

The shots were home video of the boy. Performing confidently for the camera, his vitality was palpable. I imagined one of his parents behind the viewfinder of the camera with nary a thought that, one day, this two dimensional version of their son would be broadcast into the lounge rooms of tens of thousands of strangers when a stranger had taken the story of their lives and written its most abominable chapter.

Given the circumstances of the story I did what any Mother might do. Winded with grief, I clapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying. Monitoring my reaction, Ratings Man seemed pleased, in a bloodless sort of way. He said, “That’s exactly what we want”. I was thanked and told I could leave. I went to the ladies toilet to cry.

There’s every chance that Ratings Man was familiar with a report by Mediascope, a non-profit media-research and policy organisation in the US, which stated in one of its reports that “…stories of crime and violence increase newscasts’ ratings.” Or, in the vernacular of the newsroom, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

These memories sit side by side in my heart, a shocking crime against an innocent, and a man who appeared to have forgotten how to feel about it.

For Eileen Dorothy (My Gran)

Recent news that the government provides funding to pregnancy counselling services who advertise their organisations as being non-directive, but refuse to provide abortion referrals, has been a good excuse for folk on both sides of the debate to dust off their polemics and give them a good airing.

The thing I find sinister is that pregnancy counselling has been singled out to receive its own medicare item number, when counselling for no other surgical procedure is deemed worthy of such an honour. In announcing this initiative, the Ministers, Prime and Health, stated, “Australia’s abortion rate is far too high.”

No doubt that Medicare number will allow a compilation of data, which can be polished up and worked into a nice graph, which the current Medicare numbers for the abortion procedure don’t allow, they remain politely unclear.

Based on statistical data compiled from both sides of my extended family it seems that as soon as it was possible to avoid having six children, one tended to avoid it like the plague. Of my ten Aunts and Uncles, five on each side, none of them was keen to repeat the experience. One of them became a Nun.

Catholic and poor, my maternal Grandparents had four daughters and two sons over a period of twenty years. In an attempt to terminate her fifth pregnancy my Grandmother drank gin and took a hot bath, which was rumoured to induce miscarriage. As a young woman, unable to imagine the shame and terror of seeking an illegal abortion during the 1950s, I found the story sort of funny. My austere old Gran knocking back a bottle of gin and soaking in a hot bath while elsewhere in the house her children fought each other over food. Rethinking it, aged forty, as she was, I feel profoundly sad.

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, links the startling decline of crime in America during the nineties to the legalisation of abortion 18 years earlier. It’s not much of a leap to interpret the impressive display of graphs and statistics as saying that the sort of woman who sought an abortion was the sort of woman bound to raise a future criminal.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point, counters the argument. The fertility drop caused by the pill, which was far greater, “… didn’t lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime.”

Gladwell writes respectfully of Levitt “if we are to have an honest conversation about things like crime and abortion, we are obliged to consider those phenomena in all their dimensions.” And “It takes a certain amount of courage to make an argument like that.”

All the number crunching and theorizing doesn’t change the fact that every abortion is experienced by a woman who is scared, confused and sad and that what she chooses to do is nobody’s business but her own. Whatever her decision, it’s one that will take a certain amount of courage.