Missing Children, Damaged Mothers: ACT Abortion Statistics 1999-2000
March 2001
© ACT Right to Life Association Inc, 2001
ISBN 0 9598444 9 X
ISBN 0 9578935 0 7 (online)Executive summary
The Health Regulation (Maternal Health Information) Act was passed on 26 November 1998, and included the requirement for the Health Minister to produce quarterly statistical reports on abortion. In late November 2000 the final quarter of the first year of statistics was tabled in the ACT Legislative Assembly. The statistics reveal that:
- there were 1664 abortions performed in the ACT in 1999-2000;
- the ACT abortion rate in 1999-2000 was 22.3 per 1000 women of reproductive age (15-44 years) as compared to 56.8 live births per 1000 women, or one abortion for every 2.5 live births;
- amongst teenage women, the abortion rate is more than twice the birth rate - for every live birth there are more than two abortions. This is higher than the rate for South Australian teenagers and appears to be high by Australian and Western European standards;
- the highest abortion rate in the ACT is amongst women aged 20-24, at 34.8 abortions per 1000 women, but the birth rate is higher in this group than for teenagers meaning that there was one abortion for every 1.3 births; and,
- by contrast, the birth rate is highest amongst 25-34 year old women with 106 births per 1000 women in this age group.
- nearly all abortions in the ACT (95 per cent) are performed by Family Planning ACT's abortion facility, Reproductive Healthcare Services.
Recommendations
Educational authorities should institute access and equity programs focused on making sure that all women who are pregnant or who have children have every opportunity to complete their school or tertiary education. This would be an important step to reducing the high teenage abortion rate.
The Health Minister should improve the level of information available from the quarterly statistics by following the South Australian statistics where there is an opportunity to provide more detailed information. This would include providing:
- statistics detailing the number of women by each year of age;
- more detailed categories of reason for abortion; and,
- records of foetal gestation at the time of the abortion in four week intervals.
There should be a renewed effort - particularly by policy makers - to try to understand the complex social problem of abortion, because only by understanding it will we be able to formulate policies and programs to reduce the abortion rate.
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