Abortion is a difficult societal issue where health concerns are paramount. Women should have the right to make decisions about their own bodies. Laws around the issue of abortion should be based on health grounds, not criminal penalties.
Abortion is a health issue
Civil Liberties Australia is pleased that the Queensland Parliament has finally updated its 19th century abortion laws, allowing doctors to perform medical abortions without fear of prosecution.
CLA remains concerned, however, that abortion remains on the criminal books in Queensland and subject to a Queensland Supreme Court decision. Abortion has been decriminalised in the ACT and, recently, Victoria. Queensland should have taken this opportunity to do the same.
Women should have the right to control their bodies and their own fertility, yet the law dealing with abortion in Queensland comes from a time when women could not vote, sit on a jury or enter into contracts without their husband’s permission.
Like NSW – and until recently Victoria – access to abortion in Queensland is only permitted on the basis of a Supreme Court decision which held that surgical abortion was lawful where it was committed to ‘protect the physical or mental health of the mother’.
Unlike the United States, where the decision in Roe v Wade overturned state laws which prohibited medical abortions, there is no uniform right to a medical abortion across Australia and the decisions of the NSW and Queensland Supreme Court remain vulnerable.
A single decision by the High Court could overturn the status quo, which now forces women in NSW and Queensland to travel inter-state to access an abortion, even where the mental health of the mother is threatened. Without a bill or charter of rights there is no guarantee that the High Court (however sympathetic) would find an implicit ‘right to privacy’, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion.
Decriminalisation – and moving abortion procedures from criminal statutes to health legislation – would ensure women have the right to control their fertility and bodies in a safe and properly regulated environment. It would provide certainty to women and to doctors.
It is time abortion was considered a health issue, not a crime.
ENDS
Re: Abortion amendments pass Qld Parliament http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/03/2675631.htm
– author: Tim Vines, CLA media spokesperson
Yes women should be able to have control over their own bodies… however not when it has an impact on someone else’s life, including her own child’s. It is not the mother’s right to determine whether or not her child should live. That is going back to the primitive morals of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Obviously it is unreasonable to not have exceptions but that what they should be; exceptions as in under exceptional circumstances, for example when someone has been raped or they cannot go through with the pregnancy for risk of death.