All statute and common-law criminal offences relating to abortion will be abolished in the ACT under Wayne Berry’s private members’ Bill, a draft of which was made public yesterday.
The Bill has just two operative clauses. The first repeals those sections of the Crimes Act which make it an offence punishable by 10 years’ jail for a woman to procure an abortion; for a doctor to perform one; or for anyone to provide drugs with the intent of causing an abortion.
The second repeals all common-law crimes related to abortion.
M Berry, a Labor MLA, said: “”It would be just up to a woman and her doctor.”
Under Mr Berry’s Bill, the abortion-inducing French drug RU486 could be administered. A group of clerics has called on the Government to stop a trial of the drug in Australia, but the Minister for Health, Carmen Lawrence, has refused.
Mr Berry said the RU486 dispute was a timing co-incidence with the tabling this month of his Bill.
His concern was to prevent women having to go to Sydney for abortions. “”At present, about 1500 women a year have to go to Sydney,” he said. “”You hear terrible stories of college kids having to go up on the bus in one day with money borrowed from friends.”
With the legal position clarified and a clinic opening soon, the ACT would not have the embarrassment of not being able to provide the service here.
As a practical in the ACT matter women could only get an abortion in a public hospital after referral from a GP to an obstetrician.
Mr Berry said that in 1992 as Minister for Health he had removed the earlier legal requirement that abortions could only be performed in a public hospital, but until now there was no clinic.
The ACT Family Planning Association, a non-government body, is to open a clinic in Canberra soon. The precise date is not going to be widely publicised for fear of demonstrations and harassment of patients and staff.
Mr Berry said, “”The present criminal law is based on English law when women were seen as chattels of men with no voting or property rights. If this was a service required by men, it would have happened a lot sooner. It is intolerable that this service provided to 80,000 women a year in Australia should be associated with the criminal law.”
As it is a Private Members’ Bill it will be a conscience vote in the Labor Party. Abortion is a conscience issue in the Liberal Party.
Liberal Leader Kate Carnell said she agreed that abortion should not be a criminal matter. She had concerns, however, that the abortion drug RU486 might become a substitute contraceptive, which would not be helpful for women’s health. The first priority must be education and the provision of cheap, effective contraception.
Abortion with its attendant side effects and risks was no substitute for that. But abortion should be available if a woman felt she could not continue the pregnancy for physical or psychological reasons.
It is likely that at least three Labor and four Liberal MLAs would vote against the Bill. At least three Labor, one Liberal and the two independents support liberalisation of abortion laws, whether all those would go as far as the Berry position of no law at all is another matter.