Page 2567 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 1994
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Equally, we cannot ignore our responsibility as legislators. Ineffective and outdated laws are bad laws and should be ditched. If we believe that they are no longer to be enforced, we must do our duty and change these laws. In my view, it is a sign of weakness inherent in the legislation that the harshness of the law has been ameliorated by the judiciary to reflect community standards. We have to make sure that that weakness does not prevail. We are, after all, the law-makers.
In the specific case I have raised today, the penalties under the Crimes Act are up to 10 years' gaol. Quite simply, I do not believe that the community would countenance laws which could result in a woman being sent to gaol for 10 years because she had had an abortion. Nor would they accept that her doctor should suffer the same fate for performing that abortion. Surely a woman faced with the difficulty of such a decision should be granted our support, not threatened with a gaol sentence. Society has moved a long way from 1861, and it is time we brought our laws into line with community attitudes on this issue.
Some will express concern that this will open up the floodgates for abortions performed by unqualified people or for abortions in late stages of pregnancy. These are, in my view, scare tactics by those who do not want women to clearly exercise that choice free of criminal sanctions. This is not the experience in Canada, where in 1988 their Supreme Court struck down the criminal provisions in their law, as my Bill seeks to do. There has been no avalanche of abortions in Canada. It has been claimed that there are protections in place that will be swept away by my Bill. My Bill sweeps away only one thing - the threat of a gaol sentence.
I need to debunk some of the myths being put around in the debate in the community. The first is the myth that there will be late abortions. There is nothing in the current law which sets a time limit. There are, however, protections in the law, and I am not proposing to repeal those. The existing section 40 of the Crimes Act, the section dealing with child destruction, is another section steeped in early law which provides for penalties for contributing to a child's death or for preventing a child from being born alive. This section of the law applies to the period nearer to childbirth. The simple fact is that under the current system applying in relation to abortion, which will not change under my amendment to the Crimes Act, late abortions do not occur. The mechanisms that prevent late abortions are already in place. It is not the law that is stopping late abortions; it is women and their doctors. Doctors are not going to act against the interests of women and their unborn babies. Women in the later stages of a pregnancy are not going to seek an abortion, because as a pregnancy progresses they come to know their unborn child as a person.
Myth No. 2 concerns the backyard abortions. The law that is preventing them now is not affected by this Bill. It is the Medical Practitioners Registration Act. The only way we would see a return to backyard abortions is if the current Crimes Act provisions were enforced. Myth No. 3 is that we need law to enforce counselling. I strongly support counselling. That is why as Health Minister, as members may recall, I allocated extra funds for it. At such a difficult time for a woman we have to provide the counselling and support she needs. But, in my belief, it would be difficult to legislate for counselling, and, in my belief, there should be no such provisions in a Crimes Act. It is not the place for them. Of course, there are provisions which indeed deal with this.
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