Should politics or conscience dominate debates about abortion? Photo: Manu Padilla.
One of the great strengths of Australian parliaments has been our willingness to allow conscience votes on moral issues, including voluntary assisted dying, same-sex marriage, and other matters where personal – and religious – values may play a role in decision-making.
Politicians can vote according to their beliefs without compromising party loyalty (whether that accords with the majority of their electorate is another matter).
This has largely saved us from the bitter polarisation we see in the United States over abortion.
As popes Francis and Leo have reminded us in recent times, there’s more to being a Christian than so-called “pelvic theology”. Social justice, compassion and human dignity all rate as strongly on the moral compass as what people do with their own bodies.
In the US, there have been 11 murders, 42 bombings, more than 200 arsons, and thousands of other criminal incidents aimed at abortion providers and clinics – a perverse way to campaign for life.
By contrast, in the South Australian Parliament, a motion to ban abortion after 25 weeks’ gestation was defeated in the Lower House on a conscience vote last week, despite the Labor premier and Liberal leader both voting for it.
I have not had an abortion, and nor would I ever do so. However, a woman’s right to control her own body is a hill I’m willing to die on. I have and will support friends going through this agonising choice without imposing my own judgements on them.
Alongside my four living children, I’ve also lost a baby to late miscarriage at 20 weeks, so I’m well aware of what it’s like to feel a baby move within you, to have your body change and grow, then watch an ultrasound screen hoping, desperately, all is well.
So, as the spectre of divisive debate begins to raise its head in Australia, perhaps it’s time for facts about late-term abortions.
The first is that they’re rare, representing between one and three per cent of all legal terminations.
At around 20 weeks of gestation, most women have a diagnostic ultrasound. Many post-20-week abortions will be wanted pregnancies where a major, unsurvivable foetal abnormality is discovered.
A further cohort of women experience conditions including cancer, severe eclampsia or haemorrhage. Ending the pregnancy may be the only way to save the woman’s life.
Should a woman bleed to death to save her baby? Is she simply an empty vessel for procreation, rather than an independent, loved, valued human being whose life is worth saving?
It’s worth noting that most mainstream Christian denominations, including the Catholic church, have never taught that an unborn child’s life takes precedence over the mother’s in life and death situations.
Some post-20-week abortions will be performed on children or vulnerable adults, physically or intellectually disabled or suffering from major psychiatric illnesses, who do not understand they are pregnant. These may include girls as young as 11 or 12, often sexually abused by a relative, or disabled women raped by caregivers.
In all Australian states (except the ACT), late-term abortion requires two doctors to agree that there is a severe risk to a woman’s physical or mental well-being. Here, the decision-making process in these cases is overseen by a hospital ethics committee. These laws ensure women in extreme circumstances have some choice and dignity.
Australians would overwhelmingly agree that aborting a full-term healthy baby is abhorrent and disgusting. That’s why elective, non‑medically indicated abortion in late pregnancy cannot be legally requested in this country and is extraordinarily unlikely in practice.
Despite the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision (overturning Roe v Wade), the total number of US abortions nationwide increased by about 11 per cent in 2023, reaching the highest level in over a decade.
Some will be later abortions because women can’t access local services and must find a way to travel interstate, which is often inaccessible for vulnerable people. Before Dobbs, abortion rates had been declining slowly in the US for most of the 21st century.
Women do not undertake abortions lightly. The idea that healthy babies are aborted close to term in this country is a vicious, imported fantasy that demonises and deeply distresses women making very difficult decisions.
The major preventatives for abortion are good health care, excellent education, strong social support and well-understood women’s rights.
Investing in those undisputed public goods is a better path for us all than politicising abortion access.
Genevieve Jacobs is the CEO of Hands Across Canberra, the ACT’s community foundation
Original Article published by Genevieve Jacobs on Region Canberra.
