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ACT Right to Life AssociationN E W S L E T T E RAutumn 1998 |
The results of the ACT election appear to be favourable to the pro-life cause, with prominent campaigners for abortion and euthanasia losing influence in the new Assembly and new members tending to bring a more pro-life influence.
It now appears that there are enough votes in the Assembly to block both euthanasia legislation and legislation to decriminalise abortion. The two endorsed pro-life candidates from the Osborne Independent Group, Paul Osborne MLA and Dave Rugendyke MLA, hold the balance of power in the new Assembly.
It is interesting to note that, of the 43 candidates endorsed by the ACT Voluntary Euthanasia Society, only 3 were elected. By contrast, of the 23 candidates endorsed by ACTRTLA in the ad published in The Canberra Times on the day of the election (some candidates responded too late to be included in our pamphlet), 7 were elected (Paul Osborne, Trevor Kaine, Brendan Smyth, Bill Stefaniak, Dave Rugendyke, Gary Humphries, Greg Cornwell).
Re-elected Chief Minister Kate Carnell MLA, though not endorsed as pro-life because of her voting record on abortion and her qualified response to our questionnaire, has a good record of opposing euthanasia. Re-elected Harold Hird MLA did not respond to our questionnaire, but also has a good voting record against euthanasia.
Candidates for the ACT Labor Party did not respond to our questionnaire. However, it is understood that both new Labor Leader of the Opposition Jon Stanhope and new Labor MLA for Brindabella John Hargreaves are against euthanasia, adding to a firm majority against euthanasia in the new Assembly.
Similarly, as well as the 7 endorsed pro-life candidates who were elected, it appears that MLAs such as Bill Wood, John Hargreaves, Kate Carnell and Harold Hird would probably oppose legislation to decriminalise abortion. This means that votes opposing decriminalised abortion would probably command a majority in the 17 member Assembly.
The Council of the ACT Right to Life Association planned a comprehensive campaign which has generated positive feedback from around Canberra.
While the campaign involved press advertising in the Catholic Voice, The Chronicle and The Canberra Times, as well as leaflets in the electorate of Ginninderra to warn voters of Wayne Berry’s record, the central thrust of the campaign was ACTRTLA’s How to Vote leaflet.
ACTRTLA distributed 50,000 How to Vote leaflets throughout Canberra. The majority of these leaflets were distributed on the weekend before the election to churches across Canberra by a small army of volunteers. A smaller number were letterboxed in targeted suburbs in the electorates of Brindabella and Molonglo.
In addition, each advertisement and leaflet invited members of the public to access further information on candidates by either telephoning the Association or looking up the election information on the ACTRTLA Internet site.
The Association received very positive feedback from many members of the public on the campaign, which indicates that we may have had a good impact on the results of the election.
In a minor post election hiccup, new Osborne Independent Group MLA Dave Rugendyke appeared to drop his pro-life stance while being interviewed on ABC Radio in the week after the election. A quick follow-up to his office by ACTRTLA president Nicola Pantos resulted in a letter of explanation from both Paul Osborne MLA and Dave Rugendyke MLA, assuring us they would keep their pre-election pledge to oppose any attempt to decriminalise abortion and euthanasia.
Edited submission of the ACT Right to Life Association to the Medical Practitioners’ Board of Victoria on the Ethical and Clinical Practice Issues Around the Late Termination of Pregnancy — December 1997
The ACT Right to Life Association exists to protect the right to life of every human being, from conception till natural death. The Association urges the Medical Practitioners’ Board of Victoria to recommend against allowing late term abortions to be tolerated in Victoria.
Background
Apparently few doctors in Australia practice abortion after the twentieth week of gestation, though there is one doctor who has stated publicly that he would perform abortions as late as 28 weeks.
The presence of a doctor or doctors willing to perform abortions to seven months is of particular concern to the ACT Right to Life Association because of an attempt in the ACT in 1994 to remove all laws restricting the availability of abortion. There is the possibility, given the sponsor of the legislation concerned is now the leader of the opposition in the Assembly, that new legislation may be introduced after the ACT’s February 1998 election. [At the time of writing the submission, the leader of the opposition was Wayne Berry.] Such legislation would create a climate which might encourage a late term abortion doctor to establish a business in Canberra, especially given the close proximity of the large Sydney abortion market. Therefore the findings of the Medical Practitioners’ Board of Victoria may well be an important influence on any future debate in the ACT.
The timing of abortions
Although there is no ethical difference between taking the life of an unborn child at 10 weeks gestation or at 24 weeks gestation, given that the same child is just fourteen weeks more mature, there are some clear differences in public perception and significance between the two deaths.
In the case of late term abortions, the child is much more recognisably human and is similar in most respects, except size, to a recently born child. In addition, the underlying purpose of abortion in many late term abortions, as opposed to first trimester abortions, is apparently different.
Given that children born at 23 weeks’ gestation routinely survive outside their mother’s womb, and medical advances are likely to reduce this age of survival over time, it appears that some doctors are aborting children that can survive outside their mother.
While aborting an unborn child to 20 weeks might be motivated by the mother’s, ultimately unachievable, wish to return to the pre-pregnant state, in later stages of pregnancy this might be also be achieved by removing the unborn child and supporting its life as a prematurely born child.
Given that the option of removing an unborn "viable" child and sustaining its life as a premature birth does not appear to be considered by abortion doctors, there may be another explanation for the abortion. Instead of the generally professed desire to end the mother’s pregnancy, there may be a wish to end both the pregnancy and the life of the unborn child. One can only speculate why that might be.
Foetal pain
Although efforts are made to ensure that late term abortions are painless for the mother, there is no pain relief provided to the unborn child. One might think that, if there were a chance that the unborn child might feel pain, a doctor would err on the side of safety. There is ample evidence contained in a recent study that "...those anatomical structures subserving the appreciation of pain ... are present and functional before the tenth week of life." The presence of pain can only be more certain at later stages of life.
One Queensland abortion doctor also acknowledged that unborn children after twenty weeks of gestation would be capable of feeling pain.
It is interesting to note that the National Health and Medical Research Council has guidelines which state that "unless there is specific evidence to the contrary, investigators must assume foetuses have the same requirements for anaesthesia and analgesia as adult animals of the species." It is a very poor reflection on the practice of abortion, and especially late term abortion where the possibility of pain seems most likely, that we place higher standards of protection on animals than we do on humans.
The nature of late term abortions
Despite attempts to paint late term abortions as acceptable and routine, human reactions often betray the truth behind the rhetoric.
A measure of the difference with which late term abortions are regarded is indicated in a recent National Health and Medical Research Council draft consultation document where it was noted that, in relation to a particular method of late term abortion, "D & E requires a greater degree of physician involvement and skill than the medical methods to be described later. Furthermore, the surgeon must be emotionally robust to perform a procedure requiring foetal destruction [emphasis added]."
In an article from the Medical Journal of Australia, the author notes that, when staff use foetal tissue obtained from induced abortions of unborn children ranging from 12 to 20 weeks’ gestation, "emotional reactions may occur on first handling the tissue, with some workers becoming tearful or having nightmares."
In an interview where Queensland abortion doctor Peter Bayliss was criticising a colleague, Dr David Grundmann, for performing abortions of unborn children over 5 months’ gestation, Dr Bayliss commented "it’s a gut churner. I don’t like it and my staff don’t like it."
The use of late term abortions to target disabilities
Addressing the ethical implications of late term abortions, Dr David Grundmann referred to the advances in prenatal diagnosis and asked "why invest so much money in pre natal diagnosis if we are not prepared to act on the results?" Dr Grundmann’s justification of late term abortions focused specifically on the disabled unborn child. This type of discrimination against disabled people is not unchallenged.
In November 1990 Disabled Peoples International (Australia) issued a critique of the National Health and Medical Research Council paper The Ethics of Limiting Life Sustaining Treatment. DPI said that having a disability is not inherently tragic and that it is presumptuous to assume that disabled people have a low quality of life and would be better off dead.
DPI said that "it is a particular tragedy that people should feel that there is so little social support and assistance, and that disability is so appalling that they should seek an abortion lest they raise a ‘defective’ child. Indeed, we question a social system which is prepared to fund the elimination and screening of people with disabilities, yet is not prepared adequately to fund the personal care and education services we need to lead autonomous, happy and successful lives in the community."
"There appears to be an implicit acceptance of the existing inadequate level of support services for people with severe disabilities which leads to various low quality of life situations which are needlessly handicapping people with disabilities."
"In terms of both decisions to abort foetuses and those decisions to withdraw life sustaining treatment from many neonates with disabilities, much of the decision making is not necessarily to do with the ‘right to choose’. Rather, it is to do with our Society’s reluctance to accept people with disabilities as full and whole people who are not necessarily condemned to a defective and sub-standard life."
"... severe disability does not necessarily mean a tragic existence. Rather, it is inadequate and inappropriate support services which handicap people with disabilities and serve to create a low quality of life. With appropriate support, people with disabilities can go on to lead happy and productive lives pursuing their choice of lifestyle."
Conclusion
Late term abortions fail even the most cursory examination for signs of humane treatment of unborn children at a stage at which they are most clearly human beings and deserving or our respect and protection. Given the glaring inequities at the treatment we allow for children of the same age, depending on whether they are in their mother’s womb or outside, we urge the Medical Practitioners’ Board to find against late term abortions.
— Melinda Tankard Reist
| The language of choice suppresses a critical examination of the issue. But there are other voices that need to be heard if we’re going to get anywhere near an honest debate. |
In the mad rush to achieve abortion on demand in WA, two little things seem to have been forgotten: there was a baby in the fridge and a mother who knew it was a baby and wanted proper, culturally appropriate burial for that baby.
In the deafening roar of the chanting of the ‘right-to-choose’ mantra, both the baby and the mother at the centre of events have been overlooked, swept aside in the charge to establish unfettered access to abortion.
The ‘pro-choice’ flag bearers don’t see the baby in the fridge. But the mother did. That’s why she wanted a proper burial, not have it thrown in with other ‘medical waste’.
Did that mother look at what was left of her baby and give thanks for the glorious ‘right to choose’? Did she think: "This is a great good whose cause I must champion?" Did she feel empowered by her exercise of ‘choice’?
Or did she have other thoughts? Did she ponder that she had no choice, that she might have chosen differently had she had support?
The pro-choice rhetoric is never as it sounds. It makes all choices sound good and equal, like products in a supermarket from which a woman can pick and choose. It suggests no desperation, no pressure, no coercion either direct or reflected in a partner’s passive non-support.
Many women have discovered otherwise.
They may not have taken their baby pieces home. But they are reminded of their babies every day. Their arms feel empty, they don’t like looking at babies, they appear to cry for no reason. They ask: What would my baby have looked like? Was it a boy or a girl?
Would-be birthdays are quietly marked, year after year. They feel strange saying they are a other of two when there was another one, nameless, anonymous, but never really forgotten. Some become pregnant soon after the termination to try to replace the lost baby. They are filled with feelings of self-loss and other loss.
| For many women, abortion on demand means someone else’s demand. |
The experiences of these women have been ignored. The politics of the ‘right to choose’ has taken precedence over a woman’s actual lived experience of abortion. They would like to grieve, but are not allowed: if they had relinquished their baby to adoption, they could.
These are different voices so far stilled in the abortion shouting match. I am trying to give them a hearing.
Women contributing their abortion stories to a book I am writing were physically and/or emotionally hurt by the procedure. A Melbourne woman delivered her aborted baby at home in the toilet after her ‘safe legal’ abortion. The lawyer of another says his client’s experiences equate with assault and battery. She had been told by a counsellor in a women’s health centre in Sydney that it was wrong of her to speak badly of her abortion experience — abortion was such a hard won right. Another Melbourne woman speaks of crawling through her house searching for her three aborted babies. She has considered taking her life to be with them.
A former abortion clinic nurse says women deemed not good enough for motherhood were pressured to agree to termination. She was castigated for helping women who didn’t want to go ahead with the termination to dress and leave the clinic.
Women sharing their stories feel the abortion took away a baby, but not their problems. They have worn too long the mantle of silent suffering.
While pregnancy support and Women Hurt By Abortion groups have been criticised in the media, a number of women contacting me say if it wasn’t for the care they got from these places, they might be dead. One of these groups in South Australia says it cannot keep up with the calls from distressed women seeking their help.
It’s time to examine the ‘pro-choice’ orthodoxy. The rhetoric of choice is isolationist. It tells women: you’re on your own. They are abandoned to their ‘autonomy’.
Abortion has become an act of social obligation. Many women contacting me say others, usually partners or parents, wanted them to have the abortion. For many women, abortion on demand means someone else’s demand.
I was involved in setting up a home for single, pregnant women: the neighbours objected and threatened legal action. They didn’t want girls like that in their nice street and, anyway, shouldn’t we just send them to family planning — that is, for an abortion?
We can’t talk about choice if women are driven by difficult circumstances into the arms of an abortionist.
(From an article published in the Herald Sun 16 March 1998)
Last modified: 22 June 1998