Church in the World

One quarter of Australian pregnancies end in abortion

Australasia

Abortion has re-emerged as a hotly debated issue in Australia a month after the country's federal election, with politicians, Churches, and even the Queen's representative in Australia entering the argument.

The issue flared when Tony Abbott, the Health Minister and a senior Catholic in the re-elected Howard Government, told the Catholic Administration Conference in Sydney that abortion was a 'great tragedy', adding 'It seems to be undeniable that we have a terrible problem in this country. There are about 75,000 Medicare [the national health insurance scheme]-funded abortions every year. There are about 100,000 abortions a year in total. There are about 250,000 live births, which mean that more than one quarter of pregnancies in Australia end in abortion.'

Melbourne's Age newspaper reported last week that Family First, a party that won a Senate seat in last month's election and is linked to the pentecostal Assemblies of God Church, wants to force women seeking abortions to view ultrasound pictures of their foetus and listen to warnings about grief, depression and sterilisation.

The chairman of the Australian Catholic bishops' committee for the family and for life, Bishop Eugene Hurley, told The Tablet that rather than get into the 'tawdry concept' of whether people should be made to view such images, 'it seems to me we should go back to the basic principle that human life begins at conception'.

Bishop Hurley, of Port Pirie in South Australia, said once people moved away from that principle, anything else became arbitrary. The Church needed to be crystal clear that the dignity of life was 'non-negotiable', he said.

Last weekend, the Governor-General, Michael Jeffery, declared it would be 'a great thing' to reduce the number of abortions to zero, but admitted the issue was sensitive. Jeffery told Melbourne's Sunday Age newspaper 'I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of it, or the political debate. Abortion is a very, very difficult decision for anybody to undertake. If we could reduce it from 100,000 a year to 80,000 to 20,000 or to zero, that would be a great thing to do, provided it can be done in a way where options are open to women.'

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has reportedly told colleagues there are no plans to change abortion laws or Medicare funding. In any case, abortion laws come under state and territory jurisdiction in Australia and several state premiers have declared they have no intention of changing their laws.

Some political commentators believe Abbott's decision to champion a divisive new debate over abortion may have cost him any chance of succeeding Howard as leader of the Liberal Party (Australia's version of the UK's Conservatives) and Prime Minister.
Mark Brolly, Melbourne