Profile of anti-abortion activist Dr. Joanna Howe

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In a recent episode of The Dr Jo Show, Australian furniture designer James Howe said that within his marriage to Dr Joanna Howe, the podcast’s host, “consent isn’t even a frickin’ thing”.

“Like for me, like, I just … I don’t do consent. We don’t do consent,” the father of five said.

James’ comments came during a broader discussion about sexual consent education and the government’s digital duty-of-care bill, which the Howes believe amounts to “school-based indoctrination” and “brainwashing”.

Joanna appeared to agree with her husband of 17 years’ comments, and as a successful influencer among Australia’s far-right, she immediately understood the impact of James’ words.

“They’re going to clip that up online, and you’re going to sound really bad,” she said laughing.

James replied: “I don’t give a f---. Like, I do marriage, man. Like, I don’t, I don’t do consent,” James replied.

But as it turns out, both James and Joanna Howe definitely do give a f---. Not only about an education model that aims to reduce Australia’s appalling national rates of sexual violence, but also about our abortion laws.

Over the past 18 months, Dr Joanna Howe, a law professor at Adelaide University and a Rhodes scholar, has become one of Australia’s most recognisable, prolific, and aggressive anti-abortion activists.

Until recently, it felt as if conservative Christianity’s renaissance was something only happening in Donald Trump’s America. Mormon women are among the most popular reality TV stars, tradwives are some of the highest-paid influencers in the world, the White House is stacked with self-identifying men of God driven by implementing their ideological agendas – usually at the expense of women and minorities – and the president prefers sitting down with far-right podcasters than journalists.

This has created a conservative cultural zeitgeist that’s spread beyond the Atlantic and found an audience around the world, including here in Australia.

On her YouTube channel, Dr Howe boasts almost 50,000 subscribers, and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has appeared on her show multiple times. On Instagram, she has over 150,000 followers, while James Howe has close to 200,000 – even after a sizeable drop following his comments about consent.

Joanna Howe has used her platform to attack politicians who identify as Christian but are pro-choice, and said a podcaster who spoke about her experience having a termination was “celebrating her abortion”. She described Chanel Contos – the woman behind the Teach us Consent and Fix our Feeds campaigns – as “moronic”.

She has also consistently promoted her own anti-abortion protests.

In the days before releasing the podcast episode which caused the furore earlier this month Joanna Howe organised a protest in Sydney where NSW One Nation leader Mike Newman told the crowd his party wanted abortion “stopped”.

The next day, Newman told News24 he had misspoken, clarifying that One Nation seeks to ban “sex-selective abortion and late-term abortion” only, not abortion entirely.

One Nation’s federal deputy leader Barnaby Joyce also attended and spoke at another of Howe’s anti-abortion rallies in June.

In the lead-up to that event, Howe circulated an image on social media of what she said were two babies named Ruth and Emma, who had been birthed on a bathroom floor after their mother had received a medical abortion and was left alone by doctors.

The image Dr Howe was circulating was almost certainly a photograph of sugar glider joeys – not human fetuses – something even she later conceded, according to reports in The Guardian.

Despite this knowledge, she continued to use the images to promote the rally and described the misinformation as “insignificant details”.

“Even if … the picture of Ruth and Emma is sugar gliders, like, does it really even f---ing matter?” she posted on social media.

As an Oxford-educated law professor, Howe of all people should appreciate factual accuracy, particularly on a topic on which she is so vocal.

As the furore around her podcast episode began to build momentum, Howe stated that consent education is “meaningless nonsense, and it leads to more sexual assault, not less”.

In truth, global research shows consent education is effective in reducing sexual assaults, sexual harassment and unwanted pregnancies. One study conducted by UNESCO in 2017, which included Australian data, also found that consent education does not lead to an increase in sexual activity, sexual risk taking, or the spread of STIs.

Abstinence education models, on the other hand – which are popular in the United States and appear to align with Howe’s conservative Christian beliefs – are proven to be ineffective at reducing the number of sexual partners a person will have and the age at which they become sexually active. It’s worth noting that the US also has one of the highest teenage birth rates among wealthy nations – with most reported as unintended.

When discussing the backlash to her podcast episode – which has since been removed – and growing calls for Adelaide University to fire the academic, Dr Howe told my colleague Bronte Gossling this week, “I think that what this [outrage] is really about is that I am leading a movement to end abortion in this country and that goes against the establishment view.”

That may be true. But it’s equally plausible that a lot of people are simply outraged with what James Howe said. If Joanna Howe and her supporters want to end abortion while simultaneously supporting ineffectual education models like abstinence, consent is more important than ever.

Katy Hall is a senior editor and regular columnist.

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