2016-05-30
I am not going to take a long time. As Ms Patten and perhaps others in the chamber have already pointed out, my views on this topic are widely and publicly known, so I do not think I need to unpack the substantive issue. It has been done already in the chamber. I agree with a lot of what has been said. What I would like to say just briefly is around the idea that there are all of these procedures — abortions — that are happening in Victoria for purely psychosocial reasons after 24 weeks. It is completely untrue.
A lot of people in the chamber already have said that they have had a briefing with Dr Tippett, as did the Greens. She is an enormously knowledgeable health practitioner who has been doing her job for decades. She was at one stage the president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. She now works at the Monash Health. This is her day job, this is what she does for a living — she looks after women who are pregnant, some of whom are having struggles with their pregnancies. When I asked her how many procedures she would do or how many procedures are done post-24 weeks in Victoria, she said to me, 'I don't know of any that happen'.
What you would find, I think, as a consequence and as a logical progression from that piece of information is that, if not all, the vast majority of these procedures are done in cases where there are severe abnormalities and these fetuses will not survive anyway. If they do survive, once they are no longer in utero it will not be for very long because of their severe abnormalities.
I also asked Dr Tippett about the impact of that on the families and parents or on the women who are coming to her with these issues. She said to me that these women are from all walks of life. They are not from one demographic; they are not from one class of society. Some come from very disadvantaged backgrounds. Some have real issues with homelessness and poverty and all sorts of other disadvantages. She said that those families are equally as distressed and traumatised by what is going on in their lives as other families who are more advantaged. This is not a select group of women who are choosing to abortions because they have just changed their mind for some reason. There are really valid reasons why this happens, and often it is highly personal and distressing for the family involved.
So from that perspective I say that not only should we as legislators not be meddling in the affairs of families and their doctors but we should not be criminalising medical procedure that is based on solid, evidence-based best practice — world's best practice. This, with all due respect, appears to me to be an ideological bill, and therefore I felt it was really important that I bring that up today. Ms Hartland has put on the record the other reasons, in terms of the substance of the bill, why we will not be supporting it — the unintended consequences — but I think it is important for us to call it for what it is, and some of the issues this bill seeks to address simply are not there.
The other thing I would also like to say is that this bill talks a lot about services, and I think that this is, as a piece of legislation, the wrong mechanism for that. If there is a lack of services in Victoria for women and their reproductive health, then we should be lobbying for more services, not bringing in a bill to legislate services.