One of the first things that Wayne Berry did as Minister after Labor won government in 1992 was to repeal the Termination of Pregnancy Act.
That Act required that women wanting an abortion could only have one in a public hospital and that she, or her doctors, would have to persuade an ethics committee that it was necessary to protect her physical or mental health.
That Act was made law in the ACT before self-government, by the Fraser Federal Government.
Odd that. The Liberals, champions of choice, free enterprise and individualism against the state, bureaucracy and the public sector demanding that women go before a state-appointed Big Brother committee and if Big Brother said yes, to then only be permitted to have the abortion in a public hospital.
The abortion issue brings about some odd results in the political arena, especially as views on it transcend the party divide. Politicians get very scared of it because they know it is what I’d call a “”single-issue vote changer”. That is some voters will vote on that issue alone. Politicians do not like that. They saw, for example, Federal Liberal MP Barry Simon lose his very marginal seat to a Catholic Labor candidate in the early 1980s because he openly supported abortion law reform.
However, Berry saw the practicalities. With a good Catholic upbringing he detests abortion. But equally feels for women who have to spend several hundred dollars going to Sydney. Usually they are the disadvantaged, the ones who cannot afford it. And they are going to have the abortions anyway. Far better to do it in the ACT.
Step One was to repeal the Termination of Pregnancy Act. Step Two was to get a clinic outside the main hospital system. On that, his politically ideology prevented a call to the private sector. Rather he fudged some capital works funding which in effect was a direct government underwriting of a government-run abortion clinic.
That was about as much as some of the Labor caucus colleagues would accept. They had a philosophic and religious unease. It was one thing to support the down-trodden, the exploited and the disadvantaged; quite another to give comfort to Canberra women who had to go to Sydney for abortions. Their religion or the hang-ups from their religious up-bringing said a Government could not support a change in the criminal law to permit abortion on demand in law as well as in practice.
Berry and other abortion-on-demand supporters in the Labor Party, however, were satisfied. In practice, there would be abortion on demand, even if the criminal law made it an offence to seek or perform an abortion in some circumstances.
That changed this week. A NSW judge ruled that abortion was a crime in NSW. It was a civil case in which a woman sought damages for the unkeep of a child. The defendant argued she could have had an abortion. No, ruled the judge, that would have been illegal.
Alarm bells rang. Would right-to-life associations launch private prosecutions? Would an ACT clinic suffer police raids? etc etc.
By now, of course, Wayne Berry is no longer a Minister. There is nothing to stop him from launching a Private Members’ Bill to make abortion on demand a legal as well as practical reality. So he issued drafting instructions.
Some of his caucus colleagues are most upset. Some have good Catholic upbringings, even if they are now lapsed. One comes from a family of 14, for God’s sake.
This is now no longer an issue of political factions. Could it be that even in the left- and feminist-dominated ACT Labor Party, the parliamentary party cannot get a majority to support the abortion-on-demand Bill?
Yes.
The reason is that the Labor Party hates conscience votes. They can give rise to nasty, uncomfortable precedents and MPs might start thinking for themselves instead of putting up their hand when they are told. A party that has championed the workers’ struggle against the capitalists knows that unity is strength. If the workers are divided, they are defeated.
This does not sit well in a debate about abortion, but party traditions run deep: no conscience vote. So some would prefer no vote at all. And it appears there are three, perhaps four, of eight Labor MLAs against abortion on demand, or at least against changing the abortion law: Connolly, Grassby, Lamont and perhaps Ellis.
Could it be that Wayne Berry, Labor man to the core, is going to launch a private members’ Bill in defiance of an earlier caucus position to leave abortion alone?
No, of course not.
You can always pass your private members’ Bill to another private member. (And we are talking about a Parliament where private members’ Bills actually matter and often get up.) Could it be that Wayne Berry will pass his Bill to Michael Moore or Helen Szuty? The same Moore and Szuty who voted with the Liberals to bring him down as a Minister. Yes, it looks that way.
And with enough Labor abstentions and the odd Liberal vote in favour it will probably go through.
The bizarre thing is, that it does not matter. This weeks’ NSW civil action will have no practical bearing on Canberra women having abortions.
Even more bizarrely, I don’t think he did it for the rad-fem-leftie vote. Judging by his speech in the Assembly last August when the clinic’s funding came up, he did it because he genuinely felt for the Canberra women forced to go to Sydney.
But he felt he could not go far enough then, because he was a Minister.
His private members bill is now likely to bring abortion in the election campaign, and perhaps in a tougher way than elsewhere in Australia. Under the ACT’s Hare-Clark system Labor pro-life people can put Berry last and still vote Labor.
If the right-to-life and pro-choice people survey candidates throughout the ACT they can effectively make a pro-Labor life or choice suggestion and a pro-Liberal life and choice suggestion. People will not have to vote against the party of their choice to reflect their abortion opinion in the ballot box.
I suspect it will be a heated campaign.
Footnote: Michael Bachelard, who usually writes this column, is doing some enforced research into the ACT health system after coming off a motor-bike on Thursday. He’ll be back next week.