Friday 22 August 2008

1. Treating abortion as an ordinary medical procedure deprives the unborn, our most vulnerable human beings, of legal protection which the law should afford them.  An abortion is not like any other medical procedure and any attempt to treat it as such should be opposed.

2. Abortion understood as the intentional destruction of the unborn child in the womb is always wrong and unjust.  The unborn child is a human being; it is entitled  to the protection of the law no less than any of us.  The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception.  Every attempt to harm an innocent human person violates principles of justice and is always wrong.  Every procedure adopted with the intention of killing an unborn child, or of terminating its development is an attempt to harm, even if it is carried out reluctantly and with regret.

3. The proper task of the law and of public policy is to protect the weak from the strong.  Public policy should be constructed in such a way ‘so that always and everywhere it may be possible to give every child coming into this world a welcome worthy of a person’.   There are many alternatives to the death and destruction cultivated by the Bill.  The welfare of families and mothers should be a first priority in the formation of public policy.

4. The Bill does nothing to reduce the incidence of abortion; in fact, its provisions in relation to pharmacists and nurses can be expected to increase its incidence.  It permits all abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy if performed by a medical practitioner.  It places restrictions on abortions after 24 weeks which are bound to be ineffective.  Astonishingly, it permits pharmacists and nurses to supply or administer drugs to women up to 24 weeks of pregnancy without any requirement of a doctor’s prescription.  While the Victorian Law Reform Commission found that less than 1% of abortions are performed after 20 weeks gestation, the Bill, in allowing abortions up to 24 weeks pregnancy, increases the possibility of a much larger number of abortions occurring

5. The Bill purports to place restrictions upon the conduct of abortions on a woman who is more than 24 weeks pregnant.  In the normal case, any measure designed to place restrictions upon or to reduce the incidence of abortion should be welcomed.  Abortions after 24 weeks should be banned.  The Bill does not ban them.  It authorizes them where the medical practitioner ‘reasonably believes that the abortion is appropriate in the circumstances’.  The permission given to doctors to perform abortions after 24 weeks is open-ended.  The onus will be on the medical authorities or the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the doctor did not reasonably believe that the abortion was appropriate.  This will be almost impossible to prove.  The present law which contains, in effect, an equivalent permission, has proved impossible to police.  Because of the width of the proposed permission, the restrictions imposed in respect of abortion after 24 weeks will deter no-one; no doctor ever needs fear prosecution or disciplinary action.

6. The so-called conscience clause should be left out of the Bill; it is an outrageous interference in the freedom of those doctors who refuse to take part in or sanction the deliberate destruction of human life.  The  first part of the “conscience” clause requires them to take part in furthering the very destruction of human life to which they object, through the giving of a referral.  The second part of the clause compels doctors and nurses to perform abortions in emergencies.  Yet, this clause is based on a misunderstanding of what the Bill defines an abortion to be. The Bill defines abortion in terms of “intentionally causing the termination of a woman’s pregnancy”.  Thus, the Bill is directed only at those procedures which deliberately target the killing of the unborn child.  The Bill is not directed at doctors who may have to undertake procedures which may be dangerous to, but are not done with the intention of killing, the unborn child, even if that procedure does result in the death of the child.  Thus, the provisions are not necessary to oblige doctors to undertake medical procedures in those circumstances, nor do they have the effect of obliging doctors to do so.  Rather, in certain circumstances, the Bill compels doctors to do the very thing to which they conscientiously object:  intentionally kill the unborn child, an act which, but for the last 40 or so years, all civilized communities have considered to be akin to homicide.  It is true that the Bill does not make the refusal to perform an abortion a criminal offence.  However, when conscientious doctors and hospitals refuse to perform abortions, they must expect their licensing and accreditation to be at risk, if this Bill as enacted.