Page 2445 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2022
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2015 also saw an expansion of the medical options available for termination of pregnancy, in addition to surgical termination. It was one of the last acts of our first female Prime Minister to overturn a law introduced by Tony Abbott, for ideological rather than health reasons, that prevented prescription medication for termination of pregnancy from being available in Australia. But for Canberrans, medical termination could only be accessed via telehealth or a clinic over the border in New South Wales. It was not until 2018, when my Murrumbidgee Greens predecessor Caroline Le Couteur passed amendments to health regulations to allow for medical termination of pregnancy to be prescribed by local GPs, that we were able to access this option more easily within the ACT.
Today, the barriers to accessing pregnancy termination services in the ACT are not legal but financial. In 2018, Women’s Centre for Health Matters published a report, Improving choices and options: the views of ACT women about their sexual and reproductive health needs. This report included detailed research, through surveys, focus groups and one-on-one interviews, with over 500 Canberra women, including women who had had an abortion in the past three years.
Over 24 per cent of respondents in the Women’s Centre for Health Matters research said they did not know the difference between medical and surgical termination of pregnancy. In theory, with a health care card for the prescription and a bulk-billing GP, it should cost under $50 to access medical termination of pregnancy, but in 2018 the average cost in the ACT was around $500, whether medical or surgical. More than 23 per cent of respondents said that cost would impact their ability to access an abortion. Some women said this meant they would need to seek less safe options to terminate a pregnancy.
The experiences of women and health service workers who shared their stories with us at the women’s centre during this research highlight the impact when they are unable to access their legal healthcare rights because of cost. Women talked about paying cash so that it would not appear on their Medicare record which their partner could access. I quote from a woman who participated in the research:
I struggled to get time off work and save up the $400 in time. I barely ate and walked the 6 km to work for 4 weeks to save the money in time to have the termination before it was too late to proceed.
To see that access to termination of pregnancy is being expanded in this ACT budget is good news. I look forward to seeing the report from the currently open inquiry into abortion and reproductive choice in the ACT from the Standing Committee on Health and Community Wellbeing, regarding any further action we can take to ensure access in the ACT. Submissions are open until Monday, 15 August.
I want to again thank the individuals and organisations in our Canberra community who, over the decades, have rallied, written, lobbied and supported those who needed to access abortion services for their part in ensuring that we are now in a position to reiterate our commitment to the legal rights we have here in Canberra and work to make those rights accessible and affordable. I thank Women’s Health Matters, where I was Deputy CEO until 2020, Sexual Health and Family Planning ACT, Marie Stopes, ACT Women’s Health Service, Equality Rights Alliance—another previous
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