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As a religious and Catholic person, I’m totally against with the Abortion Bill that will be implemented here in Australia. Although this is not my country, but come to think of it. Giving permission to kill an unborn child? For goodness sake! What is happening to the world? Are you doctors can do it? If you can’t, does your conscience can take to give a referral to the patient for another doctor to perform it? I’m afraid with what punishment that this country will be if ever. Not by human law, but the law up there. The ONE who give us life. I’m afraid for the soul of the people especially the youth who are willing to kill an innocent unborn child.

Here’s an article from Frank Brennan.

Medicare-funded abortion is readily available to women in all Australian jurisdictions. In some states, the criminal law on abortion has been developed by the judges. It is known as common law. The majority of Australian parliaments have now changed or at least clarified the common law, ensuring the legality of widespread abortion practices.

Victoria is about to follow this trend, debating the Abortion Law Reform Bill this week. But the pro-abortion lobby has decided to take things three steps further than other jurisdictions like Western Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory have in recent years. It is quite a try on, under cover of the claim that the Victorian bill ‘acknowledges and reflects community attitudes and current clinical practice’.

The Bill seeks to break new ground by: permitting abortion, regardless of the interests of the foetus, up to 24 weeks; dispensing with the need for informed consent provisions which would give all women the opportunity to consider their decision, and which would protect vulnerable young women being pressured into having an abortion by relatives or those who have abused them; requiring health professionals with a conscientious objection to abortion to participate in abortion in some circumstances, and requiring doctors with a conscientious objection always to refer a woman seeking an abortion to another doctor known not to have a conscientious objection.

This third and most novel item of the trifecta is to be enacted in the flash new rights jurisdiction of Victoria with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms which boasts that ‘A person must not be coerced in a way that limits his or her freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief in worship, observance, practice or teaching.’

I will offer a comment on each item of the Victorian trifecta.

Late-term abortions

The Victorian Government’s Department of Human Services publishes a detailed manual for dealing with road trauma. When emergency staff are dealing with a pregnant woman in a traffic accident, they have to consider if the fetus is viable. The manual advises: ‘Foetus is not viable pre-22 weeks (probably 24 weeks). If the fetus is beyond 24 weeks gestation, obstetric backup at a Major Trauma Service is mandatory.’

It is now commonplace for 23-week fetuses to be born and nurtured in Melbourne hospitals. Peter Costello is not alone in his weekend quandary: ‘I can’t believe that there is a proposal to make abortion legal as a matter of course up to 24 weeks, when babies are born at less than 24 weeks. We will have a situation in this country when in one part of a hospital babies will be in humidicribs being kept alive and in some other part it will be legal to be aborting them.’

Deregulated abortion services which have no regard for the interest of the foetus should be restricted once the foetus is viable.

Informed consent

In Western Australia, informed consent is defined by statute for the good of the woman and for the good of the doctor, requiring that ‘a medical practitioner has properly, appropriately and adequately provided her with counseling about the medical risk of termination of pregnancy and of carrying a pregnancy to term’; ‘a medical practitioner has offered her the opportunity of referral to appropriate and adequate counseling about matters relating to termination of pregnancy and carrying a pregnancy to term’; and ‘a medical practitioner has informed her that appropriate and adequate counseling will be available to her should she wish it upon termination of pregnancy or after carrying the pregnancy to term.’

The Victorian Law Reform Commission saw no need for such provisions, viewing abortion as if it were simply an elective surgical procedure.

Conscientious objection

The ACT is the Australian jurisdiction with laws most like those being proposed in Victoria. The ACT amendments were carried in 2002 with a majority of only one vote after various safeguards for health professionals were written in to the Medical Practitioners (Maternal Health) Amendment Act.

Those safeguards are maintained in the ACT Health Act, including provisions that ‘No-one is under a duty (by contract or by statutory or other legal requirement) to carry out or assist in carrying out an abortion’; and ‘A person is entitled to refuse to assist in carrying out an abortion.’

One would have thought the right to freedom of thought, conscience and belief in the Victorian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would have counted for something when the legislators were considering the plight of those doctors and nurses who in good faith regard the abortion of a viable foetus as the moral equivalent of murder.

Ms Maxine Morand, the Victorian Minister for Women’s Affairs, has taken the view that all Charter rights and freedoms of all individuals are irrelevant when it comes to abortion because s.48 provides: ‘Nothing in this Charter affects any law applicable to abortion or child destruction’.

Presumably the Victorian Parliament could also pass a law prohibiting discussion about abortion if it so wished, without need for any assessment of the freedom of expression, given that such a prohibition would be contained in a law applicable to abortion. This makes a mockery of the Charter.

Hopefully the novel Victorian trifecta will be struck down by Victorian legislators regardless of their views on the liberty of women to exercise an untrammeled prerogative to terminate the life of a non-viable fetus with the cooperation of health professionals whose consciences are untroubled.

In a pluralistic democratic society, the law should still have some work to do in protecting vulnerable women, concerned, conscientious health professionals and viable unborn children.

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